How to measure network latency using hardware timestamps?
Network interfaces become smarter and smarter, being able to execute functionalities traditionaly managed by the OS. When wanting to develop such a functionality, a natural question is, "how much latency can I save ?".
Hardware timestamping, an obscure functionality of (recent? Not too old?) NICs, inserts in a received network packet the current hardware timestamp. If the NIC clock and host CPU clock are synchronised, it becomes possible to measure the time it took from the NIC receiving the packet to the OS/application receiving it, ultimately answering how much latency one can save by offloading a functionality to the NIC.
With Arne Vogel, a PhD student from FAU Erlangen in Germany with whom I have been working this summer, we have written a blog article so that everyone can make use of this functionality:
An appendix of this article can be found here.