Re: [chrony-users] Massive difference between NTP clocks and PHC

[Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 10:38:00AM +0100, Denys Rtveliashvili wrote:
> PHC0 is a clock on an Intel card running under igb driver.
> The PTP port of the card is connected to a PTP-enabled Cisco Nexus switch,
> which is connected to a PTP grandmaster. The same grandmaster in fact, which
> is also a NTP source ntp-clock-1.
> 
> I would understand 36 secons of a difference (TIA vs GMT) or some
> microseconds of a difference (some network and PCIE jitter). But a third of
> a second is very strange.
> Do you have any ideas?

Most likely the PHC is not synchronized. Is chronyd using the right
PHC? Maybe you have more than one.

> By the way, for synchronization of on-the-NIC PTP clock I tried using ptp4l
> in both software and hardware mode and that did not make any difference.

It needs to be in the hardware mode. Was ptp4l working correctly? Was
it reporting it's in the slave state? It could be a firewall issue.

In any case, I'd not recommend using the PHC refclock directly when
it's keeping time in TAI as you will need to reconfigure chronyd on
each leap second. A better way is to use ptp4l and phc2sys -E SHM to
provide a SHM refclock in UTC for chrony. With the timemaster program
from linuxptp it can be easily configured. It can prepare configuration
files for ptp4l, phc2sys and chronyd and start them with the right
options as needed.

Here is an article showing some examples with timemaster if you don't
mind reading some RHEL-specific stuff. It's the last third of the
post.

http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2016/07/20/combining-ptp-with-ntp-to-get-the-best-of-both-worlds/

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar

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