Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] pcap-ng support

From: "Gianluca Varenni" <gianluca.varenni@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:36:17 -0800

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ulf Lamping" <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
To: "Developer support list for Wireshark" <wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] pcap-ng support


Gianluca Varenni schrieb:
What doesn't work:
- timestamps are wrong. There are two problems here:
 1. the IDB option for the timestamp precision is not decoded, and I
was generating timestamps with nanosecond precision.
 2. timestamps are not in the libpcap fashion (seconds and
microseconds, or seconds and nanoseconds). It's a single 64bit
quantity that is split into high and low 32bits.
Well, I've implemented the first IDB options now in SVN *24133*,
if_tsaccur (only values 6 and 9 for now) and if_fcslen. So both
timestamps and FCS should work ok now.

FCS indeed looks ok, but the timestamps are still odd in icmp2.ntar.

According to
http://www.winpcap.org/ntar/draft/PCAP-DumpFileFormat.html#sectionpb,
the timestamp isn't a 64bit quantity, but the usual pcap way of 32bit
seconds from 1/1/1970 and 32 bits fractional second.

Do I miss something here?

I think the description of timestamp formats is quite bad in the specs.
The timestamps are represented as a 64bit quantity split into high and low 32 bits, that represent the number of microseconds/nanoseconds/??? from 1/1/1970 (that's the meaning of in "in standard unix format i.e. since 1/1/1970"). The reason behind using a single 64bit quantity instead of seconds/subseconds is twofold: 1. if we use seconds and subseconds, 32bits don't allow to go under the nanosecond. 2. several hardware-based capture cards represent timestamps as nanoseconds/microseconds as a single 64bit quantity i.e. they don't split them into seconds and subseconds.

BTW, there was a discussion on the timestamp format on the ntar-workers mailing list, here

http://www.winpcap.org/pipermail/ntar-workers/2006-March/000122.html



Regards, ULFL

P.S. AFAIK (I'm not a native english speaker), if_tsaccur is actually
the resolution and not the accuracy (as the name implies) nor the
precision (as the text of is_tsaccur implies). Should we change the name
of if_tsaccur to if_tsresol in the spec? Otherwise if we want to add a
accuracy / precision option later (which I think we'll going to need),
these names could get pretty confusing!

I'm not a native english speaker either, but you are probably right. Anyone with different thoughts about it?
This change is a breaking change in the NTAR API, but it's ok.

Have a nice day
GV


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