On 15.08.2016 23:40, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
On Sun, 2016-06-05 at 21:05 +0200, Georg Chini wrote:
In certain situations, the reported sink or source latency may become
negative.
What are those certain situations?
I'm not really sure, I believe the reports get negative when the initial
start time of the calculation is wrong. So the reported source or sink
latencies have a permanent offset which can not be avoided because
all reported times/latencies have errors.
This does not indicate that the latency is indeed negative but can be considered
merely an offset error. The current get_latency() calls truncate negative
latencies
because they do not make sense from a physical point of view.
In the context of module loopback, negative source or sink latencies are
acceptable
because the overall latency never becomes negative. Truncating negative values
leads
to discontinuities in the latency reports, therefore this patch implements
functions
in source.c and sink.c which can return the raw value without truncation.
What's the practical problem with the discontinuities? A negative
latency report is always incorrect, so changing it to 0 can only make
the latency report closer to truth. The explanation isn't sufficient
for me to understand why that is such a big problem that it warrants
adding this stuff to the core.
Actually you recommended to add it to the core.
From a practical perspective your argument is not important. You only
consider
an isolated source or sink latency, The end-to-end latency never gets
negative
and should be continuous.
In effect, the calculated end-to-end latency might really be slightly
too small,
because of an incorrect offset, but this offset applies to ALL reported
latencies,
thereby lowering the reported end-to-end latency not only when one of the
components gets negative.
Truncating the latency when it gets negative would mean sometimes
ignoring the
offset and sometimes not which not does not look like a good idea.
Let me give you an example of what I am seeing:
source sink buffer total
1. 0.5 10 50.5 61
2. -0.4 12 49.4 61
3. 0.2 9 51.8 61
If you truncated the negative latency in the second measurement, you would
end up with 61.4 ms, which may be nearer to the "real" end-to-end
latency, but
will trigger an unwanted and unneeded correction due to an isolated jump
in the
time series.
If this stuff makes sense, there should be a comment somewhere
explaining what the "raw latency" means and why we care about it.
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