2 docs tagged with "jitter"

There are three clocks in a system running an RTOS and it is worth separating them before writing a single delay. There is the hardware timer, counting a crystal-derived clock in silicon, which does not know or care what software is doing. There is the tick, a periodic interrupt that increments a counter and is the only time the kernel can see. And there is the task's own experience of time, which is the tick as filtered through whether that task was actually running when something expired.

"Real-time" is the most abused word in embedded engineering. It is used to mean fast, to mean interrupt-driven, to mean "there is an RTOS in the build", and occasionally to mean nothing at all beyond marketing. None of those is the definition. A real-time system is one whose correctness depends on when a result is produced as well as on what the result is. A right answer delivered late is a wrong answer. That is the whole idea, and everything else on this page is a consequence of it.