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Testing Zephyr PTP support

This tutorial will guide you on how to use Renode to run a set of tests verifying Zephyr’s TSN/PTP support.

Prerequisites

To start the test you need to download and build Renode according to the building instructions.

The test suite is using Robot Framework and can be run with a single script.

To create your own Zephyr binaries to be tested, you need to follow Zephyr’s Getting Started Guide.

The tests require two Zephyr ELF files built from the zephyr/samples/net/gptp sample, targeting the sam_e70_xplained board.

To build them, create two overlay files, one for the Grand Master node, one for the slave.

Config for the Grand Master (gm.conf):

CONFIG_NET_GPTP_GM_CAPABLE=y
CONFIG_ETH_SAM_GMAC_RANDOM_MAC=y

CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV4_ADDR="192.0.2.1"
CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV6_ADDR="2001:db8::1"
CONFIG_NET_GPTP_NEIGHBOR_PROP_DELAY_THR=200000

Config for the slave node (slave.conf):

CONFIG_NET_GPTP_GM_CAPABLE=n
CONFIG_ETH_SAM_GMAC_RANDOM_MAC=y

CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV4_ADDR="192.0.2.2"
CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV6_ADDR="2001:db8::2"
CONFIG_NET_GPTP_NEIGHBOR_PROP_DELAY_THR=200000

Follow the Zephyr documentation to build these samples. For example, to build the Grand Master application, run:

west build --board sam_e70_xplained -- -DOVERLAY_CONFIG=gm.conf

The test suite

The suite executes a set of tests running on two SAM E70 nodes, connected via ethernet. The following tests are implemented:

  1. node should send a PDelay request packet

  2. slave node should accept a Grand Master node by calling a specific Zephyr callback

  3. master node should send Announce packets with expected parameters

  4. master node should send properly formed Sync and Sync Follow Up packets

  5. master node should send Sync packets in valid intervals

  6. slave node should sync its clock to master

Running the test

To start the test, simply run the following command from the Renode root directory:

renode-test tests/platforms/SAME70.robot

This will run the whole suite of tests. After the test is finished, the result will be stored in output/tests/report.html.

To switch the binaries used in these tests, edit the provided .robot file. Alternatively, if you don’t want to make any changes, you can use the --variable switch to specify the files you want to use:

renode-test --variable ZEPHYR_MASTER_ELF:path/to/zephyr.elf --variable ZEPHYR_SLAVE_ELF:path/to/another/zephyr.elf tests/platforms/SAME70.robot