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Raspbery Pi is not really capable of being a serious time server out of the box (astronomical jitter) though it is fun to play with. I imagine that it would be
by gorkish 5y ago
Raspbery Pi is not really capable of being a serious time server out of the box (astronomical jitter) though it is fun to play with. I imagine that it would be possible to greatly improve it with some creative bare-metal or RTOS implementation, but in Linux the Pi is really just too unpredictable to do the job well. That is not to say that it's useless though; a Pi running Stratum 1 with GPS time is still going to be heaps better than anything you can get from a Stratum 2 server syncing over the public internet.
For serious DIY players, BeagleBone hardware has both hardware timestamping on ethernet and hard realtime IO capabilities through the PRU interface (used for PPS signal from your GPSDO). It makes a ridiculously superior (orders of magnitude) time server compared to Rpi.
- Johnny555 5y agoMany companies use a cloud VM as their timeserver, I can't imagine it's worse than that.
- gh02t 5y agoHave you seen any projects/code that actually use the BBB PRU's to feed NTP? I have a Pi that can get pretty good stats (Chrony reports sub-microsecond) from GPS PPS with only one kernel flag change but I've always wanted to use the spare BBB I have laying around because it seems like it'd be superior. I've seen people talk about using the PRUs for it, but never actually seen anybody document how to do it and I don't have the time nor expertise to hack on it myself, at least not without some hand holding.