isochron

The isochron program is a real-time application for testing Time Sensitive Networking equipment. It works by monitoring the network synchronization status and sending time-triggered Ethernet packets.

It has a server-client architecture and it measures network latency by taking multiple timestamps (some hardware, some software) along the path of the packets.

Complex packet collision patterns can be created and measured by orchestrating (coordinating the transmission times of) isochron nodes on multiple stations.

isochron requires a network interface with the ability to retrieve hardware RX and TX timestamps of non-PTP packets. It also makes use of additional network interface offloads, such as time-aware scheduling (tc-taprio), or time specified departure (tc-etf and SO_TXTIME), if those are available.

The full documentation is available in the docs/ folder.

Building

isochron links with the following libraries:

• libmnl (https://git.netfilter.org/libmnl/)

Building is simply a matter of running:

# Build everything
make
# Build just isochron
make isochron
# Build just the man pages using pandoc
make man

Installation requires running at least one of the following (by default, DESTDIR is empty, and prefix is /usr/local):

# Install everything
make install DESTDIR=/path/to/target prefix=/usr
# Install just isochron
make install-binaries DESTDIR=/path/to/target prefix=/usr
# Install just the bash-completion script
make install-completion DESTDIR=/path/to/target prefix=/usr
# Install just the man pages
make install-manpages DESTDIR=/path/to/target prefix=/usr