4 ms·
> that's what IP and network protocols were made for. No, it's not and that's the problem. IP was meant for wide area internetworking, not local low-latency t
by someguydave 10y ago
> that's what IP and network protocols were made for.
No, it's not and that's the problem. IP was meant for wide area internetworking, not local low-latency time distribution.
With enough engineering one could potentially include the time and frequency reference signals directly onto existing cabling - for example they could be put onto a fiber at a different wavelength from the ethernet traffic. But it would take quite a bit of money to convince a NIC manufacturer to do this.
Some NICs already come with 1pps reference: http://www.solarflare.com/ptp-adapters http://www.solarflare.com/ptp-adapters
- detaro 10y agoWhat scenarios do you see where PTP (which gets improvements from hardware-support in widely available network cards and switches, but doesn't require extra cabling etc) isn't good enough? On a geeky level syncing everything to a central clock is fun, but I don't see much practical reasons to actually build complex hardware for it given that we have working alternatives on top of our existing infrastructure.
- someguydave 10y ago>What scenarios do you see One scenario which we certainly don't have today: access to a tick-accurate global clock across a large number of computers. It would be interesting to see how distributed scheduling and communications between computers would be coordinated if each computer had access to an internal clock timestamp that exactly matched all of its peers.