PTP hardware support on Blade 3

Mixtile Blade 3 (Mixtile Cluster Box)
#1

Does the blade 3 hardware support PTP? Do the current images enable it if the hardware supports?

#2

By PTP, do you mean IEEE 1588 / Ethernet hardware timestamping, or something
PCIe-related?

If you mean IEEE 1588, RK3588 GMAC hardware supports it, but Blade 3’s RJ45
ports are based on Realtek RTL8125BG, so actual support depends on that NIC
and driver path. The RTL8125BG hardware appears to support IEEE 1588, but I do
not see clear evidence that the current Blade 3 images enable and expose it on
the onboard Ethernet ports out of the box.

#3

Indeed, I meant the IEEE 1588 support. The RTL8125BG is a bit problematic from a PTP support, but there are drivers for it.

If you have have access to a blade 3, you can run the following command. *ethtool -T " and see if the PTP entries show hardware (or just copy the results here).

Thx

#4

I checked this on a Blade 3.

Out of the box, the onboard RTL8125 was binding to r8169, and ethtool -T
only showed software timestamping, with no PHC.

After switching the NIC to the vendor r8125 driver with PTP enabled,
hardware IEEE 1588 support showed up correctly on both RTL8125 ports.

Example ethtool -T result after loading r8125:

enP2p35s0:

  • PTP Hardware Clock: 0
  • hardware-transmit
  • hardware-receive
  • hardware-raw-clock
  • TX timestamp modes: off / on
  • RX filters:
    • ptpv2-l4-event
    • ptpv2-l4-sync
    • ptpv2-l4-delay-req
    • ptpv2-event
    • ptpv2-sync
    • ptpv2-delay-req

enP2p36s0:

  • PTP Hardware Clock: 1
  • hardware-transmit
  • hardware-receive
  • hardware-raw-clock
  • TX timestamp modes: off / on
  • same ptpv2 RX filter set as above

So the short version is:

  • with r8169: no hardware PTP
  • with r8125: hardware IEEE 1588/PTP is available

I also verified that this persists after reboot once r8125 is installed and
r8169 is blacklisted.

1 Like
#5

Thank’s Tom - What r8125 driver did you use? I don’t think that the default one was compiled with PTP enabled. I just built one for another system (nanopc-t6), and had to enable the PTP hardware support and load it as a dkms.

I will look at flipping over to the blade 3.

Christopher

#6

Thanks. We are using a custom r8125 driver with PTP hardware timestamp support enabled.

For Blade 3, you can use the following Ubuntu image:
downloads.mixtile.com/cluster-box/blade3-ubuntu-images/ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-mixtile-blade3-rockchip-format.zip

We also prepared a PTP test kernel and r8125 KO package here:
downloads.mixtile.com/cluster-box/PTP/rk3576-ptp-test.zip

After extracting the package, you can find the wiki/instructions inside.

Blade 3 OS installation guide:

The test package already includes the kernel and KO with PTP enabled, so you should not need to rebuild the driver manually.

#7

Thank you for the update.