[time-nuts] Timing on Ethernet

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Fri Aug 3 11:39:04 EDT 2007


> Looking at the IEEE 1588 while implementing in your own FPGA seems
> like an odd choice. It is an option, but you could fairly easy cook
> up something which fits your needs. It is not too hard actually.

The main reason that Timing Solutions did its FPGA was to try to get
down to sub-nanosecond level.  That's very hard to do without hardware
assist.  And much of the available hardware assist is only good to
approximately pci clock or a 25MHz clock, which was far too inaccurate
to push the limits.  The Timing Solutions experiments were designed to
specifically push the limits of the technology as far as possible, to
be NIC neutral and to discover the problems in developing the
technology.  All of this information should be in the Sam Stein, et
al, paper, but I was only able to find the slides he talked from at

http://ieee1588.nist.gov/2006%20IEEE1588%20Agenda/Stein_Sub-nanosecond%201588%20final.pdf

His results showed ~98% of the measurements were in the +-2.5ns timing
bin with a sigma of 0.9ns.  This was on a cross-over cable, and when a
hub was introduced the timing numbers became worse (a nearly uniform
distribution over +/- 20ns).

Most users of IEEE1588 don't need this level of performance, and can
get by with cheaper solutions.  Most people don't need a Cs standard
either, but some small segment does.

Warner



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