Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] time/timekeeping: Fix possible inconsistencies in _COARSE clockids

[Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 04:42:49PM +0100, Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
> Maybe I could simply patch the kernel to force a small clock
> multiplier to increase the rate at which the error accumulates.

I tried that and it indeed makes the issue clearly visible. The COARSE
fix makes the clock less stable. It's barely visible with the normal
multiplier, at least for the clocksource I tested, but a reduced
multiplier forces a larger NTP error and raises it above the precision
and instability of the system and reference clocks.

The test was done on a machine with a TSC clocksource (3GHz CPU with
disabled frequency scaling - normal multplier is 5592407) and tried a
multiplier reduced by 4, 16, 64 with this COARSE-fixing patch not
applied and applied. Each test ran for 1 minute and produced an
average value of skew - stability of the clock frequency as reported
by chronyd in the tracking log when synchronizing to a free-running
PTP clock at 64, 16, and 4 updates per second. It's in parts per
million (resolution in the chrony log is limited to 0.001 ppm).

Mult reduction	Updates/sec	Skew before	Skew after
1		4		0.000		0.000
1		16		0.001		0.002
1		64		0.002		0.006
4		4		0.001		0.001
4		16		0.003		0.005
4		64		0.005		0.015
16		4		0.004		0.009
16		16		0.011		0.069
16		64		0.020		0.117
64		4		0.013		0.012
64		16		0.030		0.107
64		64		0.058		0.879

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar