Most if not all commercial ntp appliance manufacturers have some sort of hardware support, either RTOS, custom clock, better oscillator or even modified Ethernet devices to support hardware time stamping. Truetime was doing hardware gated ntp packets in the 90s. I tried modifying one of our SyncServers and gave a presentation at ietf tictoc bof on precision frequency transfer over packet based networks. Dave Mills also did some experimentation with this. While I used mode 3/4 with a lagging timestamp for the followup function, Dave restricted that operation to symmetric modes. I have another presentation from a sync conference last year comparing the two protocols. Let me know if you are interested and I'll dig them up. Also, commercial product that does hardware timestamping is available from us (Symmetricom). I'm sure there are others out there. Brilliant Telecom has a ntp box that must use hardware timestamping. Maybe Meinberg as well. Of course, where the rubber really meets the road is recovering a signal. Most of the products I mentioned above are optimized for generating a synch signal. Their performance as client devices varies widely.
Symmetricom TimeHub NTP Blade Symmetricom SSU-2000 NTP Blade These are expensive solutions but they are both accurate and stable. In your case, you are not talking about hardware timestamping but software timestamping using a hardware clock. It is a good first step but os/stack jitter is still likely to be dominant. Also, ntp puts a few more constraints on protocol operation and clock recovery than ptp. While this lets it operate in more widely varying network environments, it often restricts accurate clock recovery. If you get to hardware timestamping, there are a few tricky things that arise. Depending upon which 1588 profile you use (I use annex D), both ntp and ptp are layer 3 protocols. That means a hardware timestamp is really a layer violation. PTP defines the timestamp as the beginning of the first bit following the preamble. NTP doesn't define it (I've tried) but Dave has a page on his website that talks about timestamping. He uses a different approach (which corresponds to ietf ippm and ITU.T Y.1540) where the timestamps are at the start of transmission and the end of receipt. These two approaches have different strengths and weaknesses. BTW, IEEE has just in the process of creating a study group to define Ethernet timestamping. This is being driven due to the 802.1AS community request. -----Original Message----- From: questions-bounces+gdowd=symmetricom....@lists.ntp.org [mailto:questions-bounces+gdowd=symmetricom....@lists.ntp.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Loschmidt Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 3:47 AM To: questions@lists.ntp.org Subject: Re: [ntp:questions] Using different timebase for ntpd Hi! Thanks all for the answers so far. > David Woolley wrote: > As I understand it, he is replacing the kernel clock's role, so he > needs to replace all the system calls that read and discipline the > kernel clocks by ones that read and discipline the special hardware. Correct. I have a PCI network card which runs it's own internal clock. I made a literature research and couldn't find anyone implementing NTP with hardware support for timestamping. Since I can modify the FPGA based card, my first step is to get NTPd discipline the clock on the card, that's why I have to replace all the system calls to the kernel clock ... Richard B. Gilbert wrote: > It might be useful to know exactly what hardware is in use. Some of the > fancier clocks have provision for GPS input. I believe that both > Meinberg and Symmetricomm offer such. I believe that both companies > offer driver software for these clocks allowing you to read and set them > and, perhaps, offering other functions as well. > Normally, I would just use a normal mainboard with a special oscillator, but that doesn't solve my problem. As far as I could find out, nobody so far modified the clock to be disciplined in NTP ... Regards, Patrick _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
