• FizzyOrange
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 day ago

    Facebook and Google are the customers that use this feature.

    Apparently. Does anyone know what they use it for?

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      I assume it’d be used for high quality time synchronisation, when you’re running your own time servers.

      So you’ve got a system synced to a GPS unit, and sends it’s time to other devices on the LAN via PTP. This would help the system account for latency between the CPU and NIC, I assume.

      • Morphit @feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        There’s a talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMUMRNRkcMg but I’m not much clearer after scrubbing through some of the slides. It sounds like all GPIO pins on recent Intel chips support this Timed I/O functionality. I don’t know if they could measure the timing of transactions to a NIC - I would think this is only for specialist hardware or testing. They mention using a logic analyser to compare the clocks of two systems after synchronisation.