That's what the chrony tempcomp directive is for. But you would have to figure out the coefficients, it's not automatic.
An advantage of constantly loading at least one core of the CPU might be preventing the deeper power states from kicking in, which should make the RX timestamping latency more stable and improve stability of synchronization of NTP clients.
Current Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS (EPEL) have an ntpsec package, but no ntp package. It's not used by default (that's chrony on most of the distributions), but the users can install it and use it.
The major Linux distributions replaced ntp with ntpsec. A better question would be who is still running ntp. I know about FreeBSD and NetBSD.
ntpsec as a project seems to be doing ok. They are releasing new versions, fix reported issues, accept patches, and develop the code publicly. While ntp still has a huge list of acknowledged but unfixed CVEs.
Steering the same PHC with phc2sys as chronyd is using for HW timestamping is not the best approach as that creates a feedback loop (instability). It would be better to leave the PHC running free and just compare the sys<->PHC with PHC<->PPS offsets.
> So your 100m->1G link for example will already introduce over 1 us of error (to accuracy!), but NTP will never show you this
That doesn't apply to NTP to such an extent as PTP because it timestamps end of the reception (HW RX timestamps are transposed to the end of the packet), so the asymmetries in transmission lengths due to different link speeds should cancel out (unless the switches are cutting through in the faster->slower link direction, but that seems to be rare).
chrony can be configured to encapsulate NTP messages in PTP messages (NTP over PTP) in order to get the delay corrections from switches working as one-step PTP transparent clocks. The current NTPv5 draft specifies an NTP-specific correction field, which switches could support in future if there was a demand for it.
The switches could also implement a proper HW-timestamping NTP server and client to provide an equivalent to a PTP boundary clock.
PTP was based on a broadcast/multicast model to reduce the message rate in order to simplify and reduce the cost of HW support. But that is no longer a concern with modern HW that can timestamp packets at very high rates, so the simpler unicast protocols like NTP and client-server PTP (CSPTP) currently developed by IEEE might be preferable to classic PTP for better security and other advantages.
My current understanding of the wireless technologies wrt to home automation:
- wifi is most reliable, secure, easiest to debug, but usable only for mains-powered devices due to higher energy consumption
- bluetooth LE has lowest energy consumption, best for unreliable broadcasting of data (e.g. temperature sensors), but has shorter range
- zigbee is best for battery-powered devices where reliable communication is needed and is initiated by the device (e.g. switch, window/door sensor)
- zwave is best for battery-powered devices which need to quickly receive data (e.g. door lock or directly controller radiator valves), but security seems problematic according to some reports
To me that looks like they are reinventing NTP, but not addressing all the issues of PTP.
A big problem with the PTP unicast mode is an almost infinite traffic amplification (useful for DDoS attacks). The server is basically a programmable packet generator. Never expose unicast PTP to internet. In SPTP that seems to be no longer the case (the server is stateless), but there is still the follow up message causing a 2:1 amplification. I think something like the NTP interleaved mode would be better.
It seems they didn't replace the PTP offset calculation assuming a constant delay (broadcast model). That doesn't work well when the distribution of the delay is not symmetric, e.g. errors in hardware timestamping on the NIC are sensitive to network load. They would need to measure the actual error of the clock to see that (the graphs in the article seem to show only the offset measured by SPTP itself, a common issue when improvements in time synchronization are demonstrated).
I think a better solution taking advantage of existing PTP support in hardware is to encapsulate NTP messages in PTP packets. NICs and switches/routers see PTP packets, so they provide highly accurate timestamps and corrections, but the measurements and their processing can be full-featured NTP, keeping all its advantages like resiliency and security. There is an IETF draft specifying that:
An experimental support for NTP-over-PTP is included in the latest chrony release. In my tests with switches that work as one-step transparent clocks the accuracy is same as with PTP (linuxptp).
An advantage of constantly loading at least one core of the CPU might be preventing the deeper power states from kicking in, which should make the RX timestamping latency more stable and improve stability of synchronization of NTP clients.