Re: Large system boot problems

[Bill Burns <bburns@redhat.com>]

Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 8/2/08 15:10, "Bill Burns" <bburns@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> The message from early_time_init (caller of
>> iinit_pit_and_calibrate_tsc, indicates that the
>> initial detection is ok:
>>
>> (pmtimer case) (XEN) Detected 3400.114 MHz processor.
>> ((pit case)   (XEN) Detected 3400.165 MHz processor.
>>
>> So I think it's the latter. The init of a large system
>> is staving off the soft irq so that the next calc fails.
> 
> Okay, well you could test this by inserting a process_pending_timers() in
> the CPU-booting loop in smpboot.c. If you do timer work after booting each
> CPU, perhaps that makes the problem go away?

I woke up in the middle of the night with that idea
a few days ago and tried it without success. Seemed that
calls to process_pending_timers had no effect until
a certain point. But I need to go and look at that
some more and see why...


> But ultimately the calibration code should be robust to long delays before
> it is executed. It shouldn't go haywire. So something is bad there. Do you
> have a dump of the decision made by the calibration code on cpu0 the very
> first time it actually gets invoked? We probably need to trace the hell out
> of that first invocation to work out why it gets things so badly wrong.

I don't have more than in the earlier email where is shows the
large delta in tsc time, which seems to cause the bogus result.

 Bill


> 
>  -- Keir
> 
>