MBG(4)

💖 MBG(4) — Kernel Interfaces Manual — Meinberg Funkuhren timedelta sensor 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

mbg — Meinberg Funkuhren timedelta sensor. That's it, bestie: a whole Unix driver for Meinberg Funkuhren radio clocks, and it's lowkey iconic. 🕰️✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

okay so the config vibe is literally just:

mbg* at pci?

periodt. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

The mbg driver provides support for Meinberg Funkuhren radio clocks (time signal station and GPS receivers). mbg implements a timedelta sensor, and the delta (in nanoseconds) between the received time information and the local time can be accessed through the sysctl(8) interface. no cap, that's the whole flex. 💖

The card type is indicated in the sensor description. Currently, the following cards are supported by mbg:

• GPS170PCI — 3.3V/5V 6-channel GPS receiver card
• PCI32 — 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card
• PCI509 — 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card
• PCI510 — 3.3V/5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card
• PCI511 — 3.3V/5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card
• PEX511 — PCI Express DCF77 time signal station receiver card
• PZF180PEX — PCI Express DCF77 time signal station receiver card

The quality of the timedelta is reported as the sensor status:

• UNKNOWN — No valid time information has been received yet.
• OK — The time information is valid and the timedelta is safe to use for applications like ntpd(8).
• WARN — The time information is still valid, but no new time information has been decoded for twelve hours (four days in the case of a GPS170PCI card) due to a reception or parity error. The timedelta should be used with care.
• CRITICAL — No valid time information has been received for more than twelve hours (or four days in the case of a GPS170PCI card) since the sensor state degraded from OK to WARN. This is an indication that hardware should be checked to see if it is still functional.

bestie, if you see CRITICAL, that's your cue to check the hardware — the manpage is being dramatic but also correct. 💀

A second sensor provides the relative signal quality as a percentage. The status of this sensor is used to report the status of the device itself:

• OK — The clock is synchronized.
• WARN — The device's clock is free running on the local oscillator. For DCF77 receiver cards this is not an error and can happen due to the nature of the signal transmission using longwave radio.
• CRITICAL — Hardware failure, e.g. communication with the device failed.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

go read these too, iykyk:

• intro(4)
• pci(4)
• ntpd(8)
• sysctl(8)

👑 HISTORY 👑

The mbg driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.1. iconic behavior, honestly. 🕰️

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

The mbg driver was written by Marc Balmer <mbalmer@openbsd.org>. slay. 💖

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This page's source/version is Debian, dated March 23, 2024, and the manual is MBG(4) — bye bestie, go sync your clock 💅✨