The TSN Building Blocks in Linux

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.