HW Timestamping on beaglebone black

Hi everyone!
Did anyone managed to enable HW TS on the BBB?
The TRM ch 14.3.7 says it is supported but I’ve found very few infos online about how to enable it or if it is actually possible!
ethtool shows this output:
Time stamping parameters for eth0:
Capabilities:
software-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE)
software-receive (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE)
software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE)
PTP Hardware Clock: none
Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes: none
Hardware Receive Filter Modes: none

Thanks in advance!

While I haven’t worked with this directly, I would suggest that you look for IEEE1588 code that runs on the BBB as I believe it will use the hardware timestamp.

Regards,
John

Hi John,
strangely enough I haven't found anything specific for the bbb, I was thinking about using linuxptp (which allow both sw and hw timestamping).
The only reference I've found is hete in the forum ( https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/beagleboard/QHXb2hm72A8 ) and it seems like i have to enable the CPTS driver on the bbb, but i've no idea how to do it! I was hoping in any kind advice from the community!

Reading the link you provided says that you have to enable these features in the kernel. If you know how to build a kernel, this should be pretty easy.

Just run “make menuconfig” in your kernel folder, and search for cpsw and 1588. Enable these features and build and then install the kernel. Seems that there is a user space test program for PTP here:

Documentation/ptp/testptp.c

Regards,
John

BTW, CPTS and PTP_1588_CLOCK are enabled in the ti-linux-kernel-dev repo, so if you use 4.1.13-ti-r34, you have everything you need. Now if you look in drivers’ptp you will find code for PTP. Not sure if any of this will work on the BBB, but it is a good place to start.

Regards,
John

Hi John,
thanks for the infos. The problem is that I need to use the PRUSS, right now my bbb runs a 3.8.13 kernel with pru support and I’ve read here that the newest versions could be a bit problematic on this front. But I won’t need the TI PRU cape support so maybe just building the kernel would be fine, I still need to do a bit of googling about this.

Thanks again!

Everyone is making the transition to PRU RemoteProc/RPMSG. Look at samples/rpmsg for an example of how to communicate between Linux and PRU. Instructions on how to build the 4.1 kernel:

https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-LinuxKernel

Follow TI-BSP instructions.

Regards,
John

You might find this presentation helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNiOlRi8jK4&index=37&list=PLGeM09tlguZTPUxEvsQiDgX0XDjfOL6oR

Regards,
John

Hi John!
Now I got a new bbb with Jessie 4.1.12-ti-r29 with HW timestamping and RemoteProc/RPMSG ! Let’s see how it goes.
Thanks again for your answers!
Valeria

Let me know about your progress as this is an interesting topic. I will help in any way I can.

Regards,
John