Re: [PATCH 17/21] time: Fix a bug in timekeeping_suspend() with no persistent clock

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org> wrote:

> From: Xunlei Pang <pang.xunlei@linaro.org>
> 
> When there's no persistent clock, normally timekeeping_suspend_time
> should always be zero, but this can break in timekeeping_suspend().
> 
> At T1, there was a system suspend, so old_delta was assigned T1.
> After some time, one time adjustment happened, and xtime got the
> value of T1-dt(0s<dt<2s). Then, there comes another system suspend
> soon after this adjustment, obviously we will get a small negative
> delta_delta, resulting in a negative timekeeping_suspend_time.
> 
> This is problematic, when doing timekeeping_resume() if there is
> no nonstop clocksource for example, it will hit the else leg and
> inject the improper sleeptime which is the wrong logic.
> 
> So, we can solve this problem by only doing delta related code when
> the persistent clock is existent. Actually the code only makes sense
> for persistent clock cases.

What's the effect in practice of such negative delta_delta values? 
What kind of effects would users see from this?

Thanks,

	Ingo