On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 14:39 +0200, Roman Zippel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, john stultz wrote:
>
> > timekeeping_periodic_hook():
> > now = timesource_read(ts)
> > delta_cycle = now - last
> > while (delta_cycle > interval_cycle):
> > delta_cycle -= interval_cycle
> > system_time += interval_nsec
> > ntp_advance(interval_nsec)
>
> I'm concerned about the clock stability of your code. By rounding it to
> nsec you throwing away a few bits of resolution (unless I'm missing
> something).
Nope, you're right. That's very much an issue that I glossed over in
this example. In fact, in the B6 release, I added a remainder field to
the interval structure, but I didn't get to implementing the details. I
do have the code implemented for B7, which I hope to release later this
week.
> At http://www.xs4all.nl/~zippel/ntp/ there are a few patches to cleanup
> the kernel ntp calculations. I extracted the first two patches from your
> patches, the other patches precompute as much as possible so that the
> interrupt functions become quite simple and also fix a few rounding
> problems. What might be useful for you how second_overflow() calculates
> the advancement for the next HZ ticks. This means ntp_advance() isn't
> really needed at all, but instead second_overflow() precalculates
> everything for next second.
Great! I think having more minds working at cleaning up this code will
really help. Hopefully having concrete code implementations to compare
will give us additional common ground to work from.
I think calculating all the adjustments into second overflow doesn't
sound objectionable, although it does seemingly bind us to second
intervals. Having the ntp_advance interface allows the implementation
internally to be flexible for whatever interval. But it doesn't sound
like a major issue at the moment.
> (The patches aren't documented yet and only for 2.6.13, I'll fix this
> soon).
Let me know when they've been updated. I've looked over them and have a
few questions that probably would be easily answered with a small
comment.
> I also included the modification for old ntp reference implementation to
> match this behaviour, so I could verify and test my changes in a
> simulator. I'd really like to have something like this for your
> implementation, so it's easier to look at its behaviour.
I'll take a look at this and see if I can do similar. Its a little more
difficult because moving from tick based to continuous adds some
complexity to the simulation.
> I started looking through the nanokernel implementation to see how it can
> be applied to Linux.
Nice.
> > > The basic idea of gettimeofday is of course always the same: "base +
> > > get_offset() * mult". I can understand the temptation to unify the
> > > implementation, but please accept the current reality that we have
> > > different gettimeofday implementations (for whatever reasons), so unifying
> > > them would be a premature change. If the situation changes later we can
> > > still do that unification.
> >
> > I'm sorta going at it from the other way (call me optimistic :), where
> > I'm trying to unify what I can until I hit the exception. Then I'll
> > happily break out an arch specific gettimeofday implementation.
>
> That's fine as long as doesn't change too much, but OTOH a little code
> duplication doesn't hurt. Concentration on introducing the time source
> abstraction is IMO currently more important, having more than one ntp
> implemenation is not such a big problem during development, so the need
> for a config option disappears and people can quickly switch between
> implementations, if there should be a problem.
I'm not too worried about needing separate NTP implementations, as
fundamentally all we do is take a number of adjustment values, merge
them into one adjustment value and apply that as we maintain time. If
the output is a flat per-tick nanosecond adjustment or a continuous
shifted ppm adjustment, the core state machine management will be the
same.
> In the end we actually may have slightly different NTP implementations, as
> each timesource may have different requirements of what needs to be
> precalculated for an efficient timer implementation. The unification
> should really be the last step, first we need to get the basic stuff
> right, then we can look at what can and should be optimized and only then
> should we cleanup the common things.
Again, with my smaller set of changes and with your new changes I don't
think fully separate implementations will be required (and even more so
WRT per-timesource ntp implementations). But I think working this from
multiple approaches will better clarify the specific needs we both have.
thanks
-john
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