Eight review findings on FrameDecoder's accumulated-scalar rule.
The squeeze that pulls a leading timeline back was expressed as a fraction of
the NOMINAL burst width, which cannot converge: inside one timestamps() call
the wall clock is frozen, so any positive step raises the lead measured at that
instant, and the lead only falls because the wall advances between packets. At
the kMinBleedFactor floor the timeline still gained 0.05 * nominal per packet,
so a declared SamplingRate of 30 against a producer really flushing 10 samples
at 1 kHz ran away without bound (667 s of lead after 1000 s of stream). Cap the
burst's total advance at half the wall time really elapsed since this signal's
previous burst instead, and the lead strictly falls for any declared rate.
SigState gained lastEmittedWall for that reference; lastPacketWall could not be
reused because it belongs to packetBurst.
The hrt branch contributed zero elapsed for a late datagram but still wrote the
hrt reference back to it, so the next packet's delta spanned two intervals and
fabricated a whole extra packet of producer time — permanently, since the
monotonic clamp discards the correction ClockOffset would have made. Reordering
is reachable in production: udps_client.c only counts counter gaps. Simply
never regressing the reference is not the fix either, because a producer restart
would then freeze the signal forever, so the two are now separated by the size
of the backward jump.
The hrt branch's clamp was also one-directional, reintroducing on that branch
exactly the defect the declared branch's squeeze exists to prevent: a backward
wall step (NTP, suspend/resume) left a permanent lead. It now shares the same
wall-elapsed cap.
Also: anchor an hrt-branch burst's LAST element on arrival, matching the
declared branch, so two accumulated scalars in one scope do not sit a burst
apart on the shared X axis; treat a non-finite samplingRate off the wire as
undeclared, since +inf produced a 0.0/0.0 factor the floor could not catch and
turned every stamp NaN; write lastCounter on the hrt branch so duplicate
datagrams are dropped there too; and correct two comments that argued for the
current code with claims that are false (a counter-gap clamp reaches the
opposite outcome, not the same one earlier, and the squeeze's steady state is a
sawtooth, not a fixed offset).
Seven new tests, each proven non-vacuous by sabotage; 54 pass. Plan document
Task 4 re-synced and its stale test count and "agree on the same stream" claim
corrected.
Round 4 of Task 4 review. Four defects in FrameDecoder's rule 3:
- The undeclared-rate (hrt) path positioned each burst at an ABSOLUTE
hrt/ticksPerSecond(). hrt counts from the producer's boot, so it is ~1e11
ticks by the time a scope attaches, and the rate is refitted every packet
with a few parts in 1e4 of wobble. The product is tens of milliseconds of
jitter in BOTH directions -- not merely imprecise, non-monotonic. Integrate
short tick deltas into accProdSec instead and let ClockOffset latch the
epoch that leaves behind.
- The lead bleed used a fixed 0.9 factor, which converges only while the
declared rate is within ~10%. Squeeze proportionally to the excess instead
(floored at kMinBleedFactor), settling it in a single burst.
- A single-sample flush fell through to the plain-scalar rule, dating it from
arrival and leaving lastCounter stale so the next real burst reinstated a
hole that never existed. Accumulate mode flushes on a timer, so a short
cycle legitimately yields one sample; keep it on the chain.
- kMaxCounterGap was inert: an absurd gap yields an absurd prediction that the
arrival backstop already rejects, and no input can distinguish the two
rules. Removed rather than left implying a behaviour it did not have.
FrameDecoder.h now states the deliberate divergence from StreamHub -- which
converts hrt with the LOCAL MARTe timer frequency, valid only because it runs
on the producer's host -- and why a remote scope's drift is irreducible.
Three new tests, each sabotage-proven non-vacuous: producer restart, short
flushes staying on the chain, and a 20000-packet undeclared run after a
day of producer uptime that asserts SPACING as well as ordering (the
monotonic guard alone restores order while leaving positions wrong).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 3 of the Task 4 review. Three defects, all in FrameDecoder rule 3.
The resync backstop was one-directional. `predicted` is never below
lastEmittedEnd + dt, so rejecting a correction that would step backwards
meant only a LAGGING chain could ever be pulled back; a chain running fast
drifted ahead without bound. Two hosts' crystals differ by tens of ppm, so a
declared SamplingRate is always slightly wrong in one direction or the other
and this is certain on a long session. A leading timeline cannot be corrected
in one burst without going backwards -- lastEmittedEnd is by definition past
arrival -- so the excess is bled off by drawing each burst 10 % narrower until
the timeline is back inside the threshold.
A repeated packet counter was treated as a normal packet. The C client
de-duplicates fragments only, so an unfragmented update reaching a host that
joined the group on two interfaces was emitted twice, doubling the values and
advancing the timeline by a burst that never existed.
The samplingRate == 0 path differenced two HrtRateFit::toSeconds() results.
toSeconds() divides an absolute tick count -- ~1e11 on a producer that has
been up a day -- by a rate refitted on every packet, so its few-parts-in-1e4
wobble arrives multiplied by the whole elapsed epoch: tens of milliseconds of
jitter on a value whose consecutive difference is a few milliseconds. Raw
ticks are differenced instead, anchored on the first usable packet so the
wobble applies only to the interval since attach.
The existing hrt-gap test could not have caught the last one: its 10 ms
producer period made the expected answer exactly kDefaultDt, so a decoder
that derived nothing passed. It now uses 25 ms.
Four tests added, all sabotage-proven. The plan is updated to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review found the decoder was estimating something the wire states exactly.
FrameView::counter increments once per update, so a gap of g means g-1 lost
datagrams; reinstating their duration restores the hole precisely, with no
threshold and no dependence on arrival time. The arrival-anchor comparison
survives only as a backstop for what the counter cannot express — a producer
restart, a counter stuck at zero, a wrong declared rate — and can no longer
step a signal's timestamps backwards, which the ring and trigger forbid.
Also from review: guard the time-signal lookup against a frame carrying more
signals than the installed table, and give FrameBuilder a counter parameter.
Leaving it at zero had hidden the counter rules from every test, and made the
hrt-gap test vacuous — under uniform arrivals the hrt path and packetBurst
agree by construction, so it could not tell which branch answered. Its
arrivals now carry zero-mean jitter.
Each new assertion was proven non-vacuous by sabotage: dropping the gap term,
the backward guard, or the hrt branch fails exactly its own test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Forward-chaining each accumulated burst onto the previous one suppresses
arrival jitter, but an unchecked chain never recovers: one lost datagram, or a
declared sampling rate that differs from the producer's real one, dates every
later sample early for the rest of the run. The chain is now a prediction,
compared each packet against the arrival anchor and abandoned beyond
kBurstResyncThresholdS, which bounds the error instead of accumulating it.
Plan amended so the hrt-fit fallback (unusable here: the fit needs 32 packets
and is itself corrupted by bursty arrivals) cannot come back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Implements FrameDecoder with five timing rules that mirror
UDPSourceSession.cpp: FullArray (per-element time signal), FirstSample
and LastSample (rate-spread from anchor), accumulated scalar with
declared rate (forward-chain anchoring, immune to arrival jitter), and
PACKET burst (backward-span from previous arrival). 9 new tests, 38
pass total.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Martino Ferrari