RFC: Capability addition for IEEE 1588

[Jack Vogel]

On 10/3/07, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> In message <2a41acea0710031052w40c10cabjf923803ba23b2546 at mail.gmail.com>, "Jack Vogel" writes
> :
>
> >I am adding support into the em driver for PTP, what I would prefer doing is
> >to add interface capability support: IFCAP_TSYNC or something like that.
> >The driver will then enable/disable the feature.
> >
> >Are there other vendor's hardware providing this support such that a
> >net/if.h capability would be justified?
> >
> >There was also some other defines that are needed, an ethertype
> >for instance, I forget what it was offhand but I did notice it wasn't
> >there yet.
>
> When I talked to HP's licensing department, there were a $1k licensefee
> for anything IEEE1588 related and their message was that even if
> the FreeBSD foundation got such a license, the users would still
> have to have one as well if they compiled the source code or some
> such nonsense.

What source code was being talked about? I'm not talking about
anything userland, and my driver is just turning on a hardware
feature, I can't imagine HP having anything to do with it, but I
double check internally.

Also, there is the ptpd project on sourceforge, that even uses
a BSD rather than GPL license, should be easy to use, but
I'm new to this so its possible I'm missing something? I'm
basically tasked with adding driver support, what happens
to actually use it is another matter :)


Jack