On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 02:24:50PM -0700, Hal Murray via devel wrote: > > Since you mentioned PTP, can we use the PTP time stamping stuff to get better > time stamps for NTP packets? (without dragging in any/much PTP stuff)
NTP can make use of some of the features that PTP hardware supports. NTP will not be able to use PTP support in switches, but your ethernet controller might have PTP support, and NTP can make use of it. Chrony has support for it, and also supports interleaved mode. Combining those 2 can give you very good results. On Linux you can query your hardware capability using ethtool -T. I have 2 hosts that supports hardware timestamps. The first returns: # ethtool -T eth0 Time stamping parameters for eth0: Capabilities: hardware-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_HARDWARE) software-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE) hardware-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_HARDWARE) software-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE) software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE) hardware-raw-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RAW_HARDWARE) PTP Hardware Clock: 0 Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes: off (HWTSTAMP_TX_OFF) on (HWTSTAMP_TX_ON) Hardware Receive Filter Modes: none (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_NONE) all (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_ALL) ptpv1-l4-sync (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V1_L4_SYNC) ptpv1-l4-delay-req (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V1_L4_DELAY_REQ) ptpv2-l4-sync (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_L4_SYNC) ptpv2-l4-delay-req (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_L4_DELAY_REQ) ptpv2-l2-sync (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_L2_SYNC) ptpv2-l2-delay-req (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_L2_DELAY_REQ) ptpv2-event (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_EVENT) ptpv2-sync (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_SYNC) ptpv2-delay-req (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_DELAY_REQ) The other returns: ethtool -T eno1 Time stamping parameters for eno1: Capabilities: hardware-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_HARDWARE) software-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE) hardware-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_HARDWARE) software-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE) software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE) hardware-raw-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RAW_HARDWARE) PTP Hardware Clock: 0 Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes: off (HWTSTAMP_TX_OFF) on (HWTSTAMP_TX_ON) Hardware Receive Filter Modes: none (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_NONE) all (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_ALL) The difference is which received packets get timestamped. If you want to use hardware timestamping with NTP, the filter support doesn't really matter, there is no NTP filter support in hardware, so you'll end up timestamping all incoming packets. Here is an example of a host that doesn't do hardware timestamping: Time stamping parameters for enp1s0: Capabilities: software-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE) software-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE) software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE) PTP Hardware Clock: none Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes: none Hardware Receive Filter Modes: none And yet an other: Time stamping parameters for eth0: Capabilities: software-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE) software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE) PTP Hardware Clock: none Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes: none Hardware Receive Filter Modes: none Kurt _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@ntpsec.org http://lists.ntpsec.org/mailman/listinfo/devel