On Wed, 11 Apr 2018, Jesus Sanchez-Palencia wrote:
> On 04/11/2018 01:16 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> >> So there is a "clockid" that can be used for the full hw offload modes. On
> >> this
> >> case, the txtimes are in reference to the NIC's PTP clock, and, as
> >> discussed, we
> >> can't just use a clockid that was computed from the fd pointing to
> >> /dev/ptpX .
> >
> > And the NICs PTP clock is CLOCK_TAI, so there should be no reason to have
> > yet another clock, right?
>
> Just breaking this down a bit, yes, TAI is the network time base, and the NICs
> PTP clock use that because PTP is (commonly) based on TAI. After the PHCs have
> been synchronized over the network (e.g. with ptp4l), my understanding is that
> if applications want to use the clockid_t CLOCK_TAI as a network clock
> reference
> it's required that something (i.e. phc2sys) is synchronizing the PHCs and the
> system clock, and also that something calls adjtime to apply the TAI vs UTC
> offset to CLOCK_TAI.
>
> If we are fine with those 'dependencies', then I agree there is no need for
> another clock.
>
> I was thinking about the full offload use-cases, thus when no scheduling is
> happening inside the qdiscs. Applications could just read the time from the
> PHC
> clocks directly without having to rely on any of the above. On this case,
> userspace would use DYNAMIC_CLOCK just to flag that this is the case, but I
> must
> admit it's not clear to me how common of a use-case that is, or even if it
> makes
> sense.
I don't think it makes a lot of sense because the only use case for that is
a full user space scheduler which routes _ALL_ traffic. I don't think
that's something which we want to proliferate.
So I'd rather start off with the CLOCK_TAI assumption and if the need
really arises we can discuss that separately. So you can take a clockid
into account when designing the ABI, but have it CLOCK_TAI only for the
start.
Thanks,
tglx
