Developments
This page provides highlights of developments to the White Rabbit Technology that has been executed by the WRC Bureau since its creation in 2024 and that are in the pipeline for the current year.
The White Rabbit Technology is maintained and developed by the WRC Bureau to guarantee its quality and sustainability. Each year, the Bureau executes Development Plan which covers improvements to the WR Technology that are requested by the WRC Members and approved by the WRC Council. Throughout the year, the WRC Bureau addresses bugs and provides hot fixes, makes official releases, mainstreams contributions, develops features and takes care of the documentation.
The developments concern two central elements of the WR Technology (see details here): WR Switch and WR Node
2026
For the WR Switch, the Bureau will mainly focus on features that improve synchronisation performance by mitigating second-order effects related to temperature dependency of currently assumed-constant values (egress/ingress latency and relative delay coefficient). Additionally, a mechanism and tools for in-situ calibration of medium asymmetry will be added. The M-pattern phenomena will be studied further with the goal of proposing mechanism for its mitigation. A couple of proposed new features will be studied in the view of their future implementation.
For the WR Node, the Bureau will focus on preparing new WRPC release. This covers a major clean-up of gateware and software repositories, re-organisation of the way different FPGA families and hardware boards are supported to allow easier scaling and contributions, as well as updates to the documentation. The release will mainstream temperature dependency adjustment of calibration constants.
Additionally, a detailed up-to-date description of calibration process is to be completed.
2025
| Development type | Description |
|---|---|
| Releases | WR Switch firmware release v8.0 |
| New Features (in v8.0) | Improve compliance tests for High Accuracy Add “no freq check” to SFP configuration Add official calibration per WR Switch version Add configurable threshold for Error wrsSwcoreStatus: Endpoint TX frames number Add SFP matching based on revision Extend number of digits in the SCB version stored in EEPROM Allow partial overwrite of dot-config items by items locally/persistently stored in WRS Display in wr_mon when PPS output is enabled Support configuration of multiple NTP servers in dot-config Extend wrs_sfp_dump: show SFP database, show matched database entry and the reason for matching, summary tables Add support of https for locations of configuration files |
| Bug fixes (in v8.0) | Fixed in PPSi: when using UDP on more than one port, problem with sync and BMCA |
| Development type | Description |
|---|---|
| Bug fixes (in master) | Fixed problem of WR Node hanging when corrupted frame received (fix in WR Streamers) |
2024
| Development type | Description |
|---|---|
| New Features (in v8.0) | Replace LM32 with RISC-V (uRV) for SoftPLL Add Assignment of IP addresses on WR ports (wriX) when L3 (IPv4) mapping is set for PTP SoftPLL settings via command line and dot-config Add support of NMEA/IRIG-B as a source of Time of Day Script for semi-automatic WR Calibration (relative) Recognition of hardware type relevant for PLL/LJ functionality: Add possibility to disable port as configuration in dot-config Add possibility to keep over firmware updates: host and authorized keys, management config Add new runtime reconfiguration parameters: constant asymmetry, ingress/egress latency |
| Releases | WR Switch firmware release v7.0 |
| New Features (in v7.0) | Add High Accuracy (HA) PTP Default Profile (Beta) Add WR/HA autonegotation (Beta) Add output PPS delay adjustment for in/out PPS alignment Add support of build on newer OS (Ubuntu 22.04) Add runtime reconfiguration of selected PTP parameters (including profile and extension) Provide more accurate calibration values (fixed delays and alpha) Add dot-config converter from v6.0 to v7.0 |
| Bug fixes (in v7.0) | Fixed Jumbo frame losses Fixed BMCA wrong behavior with redundant links (PASSIVE) Fixed problem with update of logMinDelayReqInterval |
| Docs | Add “Application Note 1” on calibration inaccuracies to WR Calibration procedure |
| Development type | Description |
|---|---|
| New Features (in master) | Add High Accuracy (HA) PTP Default Profile (Beta) Add UTC to HDL interface (expose leap second flag/value): Provide current leap-seconds & handle leap-second event Add SoftPLL settings via CLI and config Add IRIG-B output signal Provide a configurable PWM output like 10MHz |