[TICTOC] Unicast discovery in 1588

[Richard Cochran <[e-mail]>]

Dear list,

Recently I have been considering how to implement the unicast bits of
1588 in linuxptp. It looks like to me that unicast is one of those
grey areas of the standard. I wanted to request an "interpretation",
but it looks like 1588 has been dropped, and so I ask my question
here.

Clause 17.5.1 talks about slaves wanting to use unicast when the
network doesn't provide multicast. In this case, they are supposed to
use unicast message negotiation with the masters in their table.

However, the way to ask for unicast service and the way to configure
the table are both via management messages. These are never unicast,
as far as I can tell. So it seems impossible to use this option.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

Thanks,
Richard