Time synchronization on SEAPATH

Why It’s Needed

In an IEC 61850 environment, all devices — physical or virtual — must share a highly accurate time reference to correctly timestamp and correlate events exchanged over SV, GOOSE or MMS. Any drift between nodes can lead to inconsistent logs or even malfunctions.

What SEAPATH Provides

SEAPATH lets you configure both Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) for your infrastructure:

• PTP gives sub-millisecond precision and is the primary mechanism required by IEC 61850.

• NTP is usually used as a fallback if PTP is unavailable.

• When no PTP grand master is present, SEAPATH can still synchronize with one or more NTP servers, either on your local network or on the Internet.

This dual approach ensures that your nodes stay in sync even if one time source becomes unavailable.

A Special Feature for Guests

Beyond synchronizing the hosts, SEAPATH also proposes a built-in mechanism to synchronize guest virtual machines without requiring PCI passthrough: the ptp_kvm integration.
This allows the hypervisor’s already synchronized PTP clock to be exposed inside each VM, so the guests stay aligned with the cluster time source.