The TSN Building Blocks in Linux

TL;DR

This paper reviews the implementation of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards in the Linux kernel, highlighting how Linux supports deterministic communication crucial for industrial, automotive, and aerospace applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of TSN standard implementation in Linux and presents measurement results on key TSN functionalities.

Findings

Linux supports key TSN standards with software and hardware features.

Measurement results validate Linux's capabilities for scheduled transmission.

Linux bridging characteristics are suitable for deterministic networking.

Abstract

Various application areas e.g. industrial automation, professional audio-video, automotive in-vehicle, aerospace on-board, and mobile fronthaul networks require deterministic communication: loss-less forwarding with bounded maximum latency. There is a lot of ongoing standardization activity in different organizations to provide vendor-agnostic building blocks for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), what is aimed as the universal solution for deterministic forwarding in OSI Layer-2 networks. Furthermore, the implementation of those standards is also happening in Linux. Some of them require software changes only, but others have hardware support requirements. In this paper, we give an overview of the implementation of the main TSN standards in the mainline Linux kernel. Furthermore, we provide measurement results on key functionality in support of TSN, e.g., scheduled transmission and Linux bridging characteristics.