NVIDIA Proposes The Linux Hardware Timestamping Engine

[coder]

I'm not sure what exactly they need such accurate timestamps for, but I guess we'll find out.

Sensor data. Accurate timestamps are very important for realtime control applications, such as robotics.

[coder]

Yeah, I thought it might be for some realtime usecase, but with this much accuracy......

Maybe it's for peripheral hardware validation? Or driver debugging/profiling?

I don't know why you seem to feel it's unnecessary.

I can tell you from experience that software timestamping sucks. Especially if you're not using a real RTOS with bounded latencies.

[coder]

Yeah, but this is like nanosecond or microsecond level accuracy and precision. Does robotics need that much accuracy and precision?

Just because the units are small doesn't mean anything about Nvidia's purpose.

If I were promoting such a standard for general purpose usage, I'd probably suggest the highest precision I thought was practical, so that it could be also be used for things like scientific instruments and other applications I hadn't even thought of.