I am running 2 ARM devices:
- devA is connected to Ethernet network with all of its NICs
- devB has the LCD, buttons and all this things for user interfacing, but no NIC and no RTC battery
Both devices run on kernel 4.9 provided by Texas Instruments.
Current time should be displayed on LCD (devB), but as mentioned there is no RTC battery, so after power down system time is kinda random... On the other hand devB has RTC with battery, NTP and PTPv2 client.
Both devices are connected with pppd over serial connection (RS422) which creates TCP/IP network between them.
I tried pushing time with NTP, but it takes lots of time before ntpd client on devB decides that it's ready to grab time from devA (sometimes it could go to an hour or more). Now to have close-to-real time on LCD I'm forcing new time with ssh and date. That is far from what could be called good solution.
I tried to setup PTP synchronisation between them, but it seems that ppp0 interface has no timestamping available. Here is output from ethtool:
# ethtool -T ppp0
Time stamping parameters for ppp0:
Capabilities:
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
If I'm right the thing I'm missing here is the capability software-transmit (SOF_TIMESTAMPING_TX_SOFTWARE)
Is it possible to create ppp connection supporting PTP? If so, how can I achieve this? Alternatively, is there some other way to properly synchronize those devices?
