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by rnijveld 725 days ago
Our project also includes a PTP implementation, statime (https://github.com/pendulum-project/statime/), that includes a Linux daemon. Our implementation should work as well or even better than what linuxptp does, but it's still early days. One thing to note though is that NTP can be made to be just as precise (if not more precise), given the right access to hardware (unfortunately most hardware that does timestamping only does so for PTP packets). The reason for this precision is simple: NTP can use multiple sources of time, whereas PTP by design only uses a single source. This gives NTP more information about the current time and thus allows it to more precisely estimate what the current time is. The thing with relying purely on GNSS is that those signals can be (and are in practice) disrupted relatively easily. This is why time synchronization over the internet makes sense, even for large data centers. And doing secure time synchronization over the internet is only practically possible using NTP/NTS at this time. But there is no one size fits all solution for time synchonization in general.