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Date:   Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:17:36 +0100
From:   =?UTF-8?B?S8O2cnk=?= Maincent <kory.maincent@bootlin.com>
To:     Vladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com>
Cc:     Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>,
        Florian Fainelli <florian.fainelli@broadcom.com>,
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        Maxime Chevallier <maxime.chevallier@bootlin.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v7 15/16] net: ethtool: ts: Let the active time
 stamping layer be selectable
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On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:10:04 +0200
Vladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 03:53:44PM +0100, K=C3=B6ry Maincent wrote:
> > I did thought about it but I got stuck by the case of hardware timestam=
ping
> > without PHC. Richard explained the reason of its existence here:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/ZS3MKWlnPqTe8gkq@hoboy.vegasvil.org/#t
> >=20
> > Maybe I got a bit stuck in my implementation and should investigate more
> > your proposition and how to deal with this case. Do you have an idea on=
 how
> > to solve it? =20
>=20
> I would take what Richard said with a grain of salt, and interpret as
> "there exists hardware with hwts but w/o PHC, and that may work for
> marginal use cases", not that "we should design having that as a
> first-class citizen in mind".

> When elected as master, it kinda works, and does synchronize with a
> slave, even if ptp4l gets confused about the phc_index being -1.
>=20
> But when elected as a slave by the BMCA, ptp4l gets confused and thinks
> that phc_index =3D=3D -1 means that it's supposed to use software timesta=
mping.
>=20
> So, I guess the only thing we need to do to this kind of setup is not do
> too much harm to it.
>=20
> We break nothing if we make the phc_index the central aspect of hwts
> layer selection - except for the fact that such a MAC won't be able to
> change its timestamping layer to be a PHY.
>=20
> If we wanted to add such a capability to that MAC driver, the obvious
> way to solve the lack of a PHC is to create a PHC that returns
> -EOPNOTSUPP for all of its ptp_clock_info operations (gettime, settime
> etc). It may possibly be that, in the worst case, ptp4l needs to probe
> for each syscall on the NIC's PHC being operational before deciding what
> can be done with it. But that's already an improvement over the current
> handling to make it more graceful, it's not to keep things on par.

Ok, you convinced me.
Thanks for your arguments and spending time explaining it.


Regards,
--=20
K=C3=B6ry Maincent, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com