PTP Capabilities on Beagle Bones other than the Black & Green

General Discussion
1

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone is aware of the PTP capabilities on other beagle bone devices besides the Black & Green. I have a (non wireless) BeagleBone Black and (non wireless) BeagleBone Green that I have running PTP instances with proper hardware timestamping.

I am curious about the BeagleBone AI and Beagle Bone Enhanced, and if they would be hardware timestamp capable devices. I suspect that the AI is not fully capable and have hopes that the Enhanced is capable. I am hoping a user of this forum could help me confirm or deny (via testing on the hardware if possible :slight_smile: ) This could be determined with readouts of the “ethtool -T {your ethernet device here, likely eth0}” command along with a readout of the kernel options

“CONFIG_PPS=y (required)
PTP_1588_CLOCK=y (required)
CONFIG_NETWORK_PHY_TIMESTAMPING=y (optional - not used in BeageBone Black)”

I was informed (althought not a bone) that the beagle X-15 is most likely not hardware timestamp capable of running PTP (but it could use software timestamping, which is unfortunately not good enough at this time).

Best,
BtB

2

BBAI has full PTP support as far as I can tell. Here is the ethtool -T output from mine:

Capabilities:
    hardware-transmit     (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_HARDWARE)
    software-transmit     (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE)
    hardware-receive      (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_HARDWARE)
    software-receive      (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RX_SOFTWARE)
    software-system-clock (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_SOFTWARE)
    hardware-raw-clock    (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_RAW_HARDWARE)
PTP Hardware Clock: 0 
Hardware Transmit Timestamp Modes:
    off                   (HWTSTAMP_TX_OFF)
    on                    (HWTSTAMP_TX_ON)
Hardware Receive Filter Modes:
    none                  (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_NONE)
    ptpv1-l4-event        (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V1_L4_EVENT)
    ptpv2-event           (HWTSTAMP_FILTER_PTP_V2_EVENT)
3

@wealas , thank you so much for the ethtool output!
That is really interesting to see! Thank you so much! I made my wrong assumption based on information I was given regarding the beagleboard x15. It was suspected that due to the generic gigabit port and lack of processor details on ptp, that is it not ptp capable. And since the processor of the x15 is the same family as the BBAI, the not capable would carry forward. I will have to see if I can pickup a BBAI to prototype.

In the meantime, I was also able to pickup a Beagle Bone Enhanced. It is also PTP enabled. I am having an issue when I write out PTP logs via “> log.txt” at the end of the PTP command; the Beagle Bone Enhanced crashes after a few minutes of logging with a kernel oops.