I am trying to use the timestamping function of the Intel I350-T2 1 Gbps 
adapter and igb driver to put a hardware timestamp in the sk_buff of ALL 
received frames.  Note that I am NOT doing this for PTP, but rather to 
obtain more accurate frame arrival timestamps to use in code I am 
developing for higher layers in the TCP/IP protocol stack.

All this seems to be working fine, but I am at a loss to explain the 
curious distributions of timestamp values I have recorded from the 
arriving sk_buffs.  At high frame rates (>= 800 Mbps) the delta between 
successive timestamps is quite stable and reflects the expected 
inter-frame gaps.  However, at low frame rates (<= 250 Mbps) the delta 
between successive timestamps essentially behaves like a random process 
with a high variance (I should mention that I am controlling the frame 
sending rate so I know what inter-frame gaps I expect to measure at the 
receiver).  So far, I only have measurements at these two extremes so I 
don't know anything about how accuracy varies over the entire range of 
arrival rates.

I had expected the timestamps to have the same accuracy independent of 
the frame arrival rate.  Do you have any ideas about why I might be 
seeing this behavior?  The details of my configuration are given below.
Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated.

  -- Don Smith

-- 
F. Donelson Smith (Don)                      (919) 962-1884
Research Professor                           [email protected]
Department of Computer Science               www.cs.unc.edu/~smithfd
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

==========================================================================
Kernel (RHEL 6.4) on Dell R710 system
uname -r
2.6.32-358.11.1.el6.x86_64

Adapter (Intel I350-T2):
ethtool -i p6p1
driver: igb
version: 4.0.1-k
firmware-version: 1.63, 0x0a608000

ethtool -k p6p1
Features for p6p1:
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp-segmentation-offload: off
udp-fragmentation-offload: off
generic-segmentation-offload: off
generic-receive-offload: off
large-receive-offload: off
rx-vlan-offload: on
tx-vlan-offload: on
ntuple-filters: off
receive-hashing: on

ethtool -c p6p1
Coalesce parameters for p6p1:
Adaptive RX: off  TX: off
stats-block-usecs: 0
sample-interval: 0
pkt-rate-low: 0
pkt-rate-high: 0

rx-usecs: 3
rx-frames: 0
rx-usecs-irq: 0
rx-frames-irq: 0
(Note: all the rest have value 0)


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