xref: /linux/Documentation/driver-api/pps.rst (revision 0ea5c948cb64bab5bc7a5516774eb8536f05aa0d)
1.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
2
3======================
4PPS - Pulse Per Second
5======================
6
7Copyright (C) 2007 Rodolfo Giometti <giometti@enneenne.com>
8
9This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
10it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
11the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
12(at your option) any later version.
13
14This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
15but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
16MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
17GNU General Public License for more details.
18
19
20
21Overview
22--------
23
24LinuxPPS provides a programming interface (API) to define in the
25system several PPS sources.
26
27PPS means "pulse per second" and a PPS source is just a device which
28provides a high precision signal each second so that an application
29can use it to adjust system clock time.
30
31A PPS source can be connected to a serial port (usually to the Data
32Carrier Detect pin) or to a parallel port (ACK-pin) or to a special
33CPU's GPIOs (this is the common case in embedded systems) but in each
34case when a new pulse arrives the system must apply to it a timestamp
35and record it for userland.
36
37Common use is the combination of the NTPD as userland program, with a
38GPS receiver as PPS source, to obtain a wallclock-time with
39sub-millisecond synchronisation to UTC.
40
41
42RFC considerations
43------------------
44
45While implementing a PPS API as RFC 2783 defines and using an embedded
46CPU GPIO-Pin as physical link to the signal, I encountered a deeper
47problem:
48
49   At startup it needs a file descriptor as argument for the function
50   time_pps_create().
51
52This implies that the source has a /dev/... entry. This assumption is
53OK for the serial and parallel port, where you can do something
54useful besides(!) the gathering of timestamps as it is the central
55task for a PPS API. But this assumption does not work for a single
56purpose GPIO line. In this case even basic file-related functionality
57(like read() and write()) makes no sense at all and should not be a
58precondition for the use of a PPS API.
59
60The problem can be simply solved if you consider that a PPS source is
61not always connected with a GPS data source.
62
63So your programs should check if the GPS data source (the serial port
64for instance) is a PPS source too, and if not they should provide the
65possibility to open another device as PPS source.
66
67In LinuxPPS the PPS sources are simply char devices usually mapped
68into files /dev/pps0, /dev/pps1, etc.
69
70
71PPS with USB to serial devices
72------------------------------
73
74It is possible to grab the PPS from an USB to serial device. However,
75you should take into account the latencies and jitter introduced by
76the USB stack. Users have reported clock instability around +-1ms when
77synchronized with PPS through USB. With USB 2.0, jitter may decrease
78down to the order of 125 microseconds.
79
80This may be suitable for time server synchronization with NTP because
81of its undersampling and algorithms.
82
83If your device doesn't report PPS, you can check that the feature is
84supported by its driver. Most of the time, you only need to add a call
85to usb_serial_handle_dcd_change after checking the DCD status (see
86ch341 and pl2303 examples).
87
88
89Coding example
90--------------
91
92To register a PPS source into the kernel you should define a struct
93pps_source_info as follows::
94
95    static struct pps_source_info pps_ktimer_info = {
96	    .name         = "ktimer",
97	    .path         = "",
98	    .mode         = PPS_CAPTUREASSERT | PPS_OFFSETASSERT |
99			    PPS_ECHOASSERT |
100			    PPS_CANWAIT | PPS_TSFMT_TSPEC,
101	    .echo         = pps_ktimer_echo,
102	    .owner        = THIS_MODULE,
103    };
104
105and then calling the function pps_register_source() in your
106initialization routine as follows::
107
108    source = pps_register_source(&pps_ktimer_info,
109			PPS_CAPTUREASSERT | PPS_OFFSETASSERT);
110
111The pps_register_source() prototype is::
112
113  int pps_register_source(struct pps_source_info *info, int default_params)
114
115where "info" is a pointer to a structure that describes a particular
116PPS source, "default_params" tells the system what the initial default
117parameters for the device should be (it is obvious that these parameters
118must be a subset of ones defined in the struct
119pps_source_info which describe the capabilities of the driver).
120
121Once you have registered a new PPS source into the system you can
122signal an assert event (for example in the interrupt handler routine)
123just using::
124
125    pps_event(source, &ts, PPS_CAPTUREASSERT, ptr)
126
127where "ts" is the event's timestamp.
128
129The same function may also run the defined echo function
130(pps_ktimer_echo(), passing to it the "ptr" pointer) if the user
131asked for that... etc..
132
133Please see the file drivers/pps/clients/pps-ktimer.c for example code.
134
135
136SYSFS support
137-------------
138
139If the SYSFS filesystem is enabled in the kernel it provides a new class::
140
141   $ ls /sys/class/pps/
142   pps0/  pps1/  pps2/
143
144Every directory is the ID of a PPS sources defined in the system and
145inside you find several files::
146
147   $ ls -F /sys/class/pps/pps0/
148   assert     dev        mode       path       subsystem@
149   clear      echo       name       power/     uevent
150
151
152Inside each "assert" and "clear" file you can find the timestamp and a
153sequence number::
154
155   $ cat /sys/class/pps/pps0/assert
156   1170026870.983207967#8
157
158Where before the "#" is the timestamp in seconds; after it is the
159sequence number. Other files are:
160
161 * echo: reports if the PPS source has an echo function or not;
162
163 * mode: reports available PPS functioning modes;
164
165 * name: reports the PPS source's name;
166
167 * path: reports the PPS source's device path, that is the device the
168   PPS source is connected to (if it exists).
169
170
171Testing the PPS support
172-----------------------
173
174In order to test the PPS support even without specific hardware you can use
175the pps-ktimer driver (see the client subsection in the PPS configuration menu)
176and the userland tools available in your distribution's pps-tools package,
177http://linuxpps.org , or https://github.com/redlab-i/pps-tools.
178
179Once you have enabled the compilation of pps-ktimer just modprobe it (if
180not statically compiled)::
181
182   # modprobe pps-ktimer
183
184and the run ppstest as follow::
185
186   $ ./ppstest /dev/pps1
187   trying PPS source "/dev/pps1"
188   found PPS source "/dev/pps1"
189   ok, found 1 source(s), now start fetching data...
190   source 0 - assert 1186592699.388832443, sequence: 364 - clear  0.000000000, sequence: 0
191   source 0 - assert 1186592700.388931295, sequence: 365 - clear  0.000000000, sequence: 0
192   source 0 - assert 1186592701.389032765, sequence: 366 - clear  0.000000000, sequence: 0
193
194Please note that to compile userland programs, you need the file timepps.h.
195This is available in the pps-tools repository mentioned above.
196
197
198Generators
199----------
200
201Sometimes one needs to be able not only to catch PPS signals but to produce
202them also. For example, running a distributed simulation, which requires
203computers' clock to be synchronized very tightly.
204
205
206Parallel port generator
207------------------------
208
209One way to do this is to invent some complicated hardware solutions but it
210may be neither necessary nor affordable. The cheap way is to load a PPS
211generator on one of the computers (master) and PPS clients on others
212(slaves), and use very simple cables to deliver signals using parallel
213ports, for example.
214
215Parallel port cable pinout::
216
217	pin	name	master      slave
218	1	STROBE	  *------     *
219	2	D0	  *     |     *
220	3	D1	  *     |     *
221	4	D2	  *     |     *
222	5	D3	  *     |     *
223	6	D4	  *     |     *
224	7	D5	  *     |     *
225	8	D6	  *     |     *
226	9	D7	  *     |     *
227	10	ACK	  *     ------*
228	11	BUSY	  *           *
229	12	PE	  *           *
230	13	SEL	  *           *
231	14	AUTOFD	  *           *
232	15	ERROR	  *           *
233	16	INIT	  *           *
234	17	SELIN	  *           *
235	18-25	GND	  *-----------*
236
237Please note that parallel port interrupt occurs only on high->low transition,
238so it is used for PPS assert edge. PPS clear edge can be determined only
239using polling in the interrupt handler which actually can be done way more
240precisely because interrupt handling delays can be quite big and random. So
241current parport PPS generator implementation (pps_gen_parport module) is
242geared towards using the clear edge for time synchronization.
243
244Clear edge polling is done with disabled interrupts so it's better to select
245delay between assert and clear edge as small as possible to reduce system
246latencies. But if it is too small slave won't be able to capture clear edge
247transition. The default of 30us should be good enough in most situations.
248The delay can be selected using 'delay' pps_gen_parport module parameter.
249