Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v3 2/4] net: mdio: add PTP offset compensation to mdiobus_write_sts

From: Miroslav Lichvar <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 17:40:05 +0200

On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 05:23:06PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > - take a second "post" system timestamp after the completion
> 
> For this hardware, completion is an interrupt, which has a lot of
> jitter on it. But this hardware is odd, in that it uses an
> interrupt. Every other MDIO bus controller uses polled IO, with an
> mdelay(10) or similar between each poll. So the jitter is going to be
> much larger.

I think a large jitter is ok in this case. We just need to timestamp
something that we know for sure happened after the PHC timestamp. It
should have no impact on the offset and its stability, just the
reported delay. A test with phc2sys should be able to confirm that.
phc2sys selects the measurement with the shortest delay, which has
least uncertainty. I'd say that applies to both interrupt and polling.

If it is difficult to specify the minimum interrupt delay, I'd still
prefer an overly pessimistic interval assuming a zero delay.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar