unruh wrote:
On 2012-06-12, David Malone <[email protected]> wrote:
some of these cards actually timestamped the frames when received
and then the timestamp provided by SO_TIMESTAMP or similar could
be corrected. It seems only a few cards can do this though.
It would be nice. But then what clock would they use to timestamp the
packets. If it is an onboard network card clock one would then also have to
discipline that network card clock ( or at least calbrate it, and as we
know that calibration changes so it would have to be another continuous
calibration of that clock.)
We would _NOT_ need to tune that clock, a static measurement of the rate
is more than enough!
Assume a really bad on-NIC crystal, supposed to be 10 MHz, but actually
off by 1000 ppm, i.e. an order of magnitude worse than most of the
really cheap motherboard crystals:
The maximum time from packet arrival until the interrupt service routine
can grab it seems to be around a ms, while most packets are handled in a
us or two, right?
Since the NIC clock only needs to measure the time between packet
arrival and ISR read, an error of 1000 ppm over a full ms interval
corresponds to 1 us total, while for all packets that are serviced in
less than 100 us, the measurement error will be 100 ns, since that is
the resolution of the 10 MHz timer.
OK?
BTW, all the 1588-capable NICs out there, and there must be quite a few
of them now, will do more than this, and with a better on-board timer.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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