Interested to implement the timemaster setup?

[gerhard-tinned]

Hi,

I have received the request to setup the server using the timemaster. This allows to synchronize two interfaces and as fallback ntp sources.

As we are planning to do this using puppet, I am currently trying to find out if I should create a new puppet module or if I should add it to this module. Would you be interested to add this feature to your puppet-linuxptp module?

As well, why did you stop using linuxptp (out of curiosity)?

[lukebigum]

I think Timemaster would fit in this module - the name is "linuxptp" and it's part of that RPM. This module already has multi-ptp4l instance support as well, so that may or may not slot in with timemaster nicely (I haven't really played with it).

One of my old blog posts compared three different PTP implementations available to me and what I thought of them. I think my evaluation still stands - you're not going to be able to consume Multicast or send Unicast on a physical NIC that's part of a bond or is VLAN tagged, but I haven't tried in a long time so maybe you can now.

In my opinion PTPd had the potential (and still has) to rule them all, but there's more and more forks and splits as time goes by that I worry that the code will fragment too much and never unify again.

Solar Flares sfptpd version 3 has come leaps and bounds too (if only they contributed back to PTPd). It is still greatly tied to Solar Flare adapters though.

[gerhard-tinned]

Thanks for your insight on your choice. As we use RHEL, we try to stay in the supported path of redhat ... which is linuxptp. (at least for now)

To give you a summary on the timemaster setup:
Instead of configuring ptp4l and phc2sys daemons, or two of each for multiple interfaces, there is only one configuration file to be generated. This is the timemaster config file. When the timemaster daemon is started, it generates the configuration for all involved daemns and starts them all. We need this setup to be able to sync with multiple (two in this case) interfaces.

This will configure and start one ptp4l instance per interface. Then for each interface a phc2sys daemons where none of them sync to the system but provide the time via shared memory. Then timemaster manages as well a ntp or chrony daemon to sync the system time.

Sounds extensivly complex but provides as a nice seideeffect to sync in case of ptp issues also with an ntp time souce.

I will have a look on how we could integrade the timemaster setup into this module. Tricky part will be the phc2sys as all the settings for ptp4l and phc2sys must be in one timemaster config file.