Re: [PATCH 0 of 5] PV on HVM Xen

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

On 03/16/2010 11:06 AM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> the following is the interesting bit of the pvclock interface:
>
> static __always_inline
> u64 pvclock_get_nsec_offset(const struct pvclock_vcpu_time_info *src)
> {
> 	u64 delta = __native_read_tsc() - src->tsc_timestamp;
> 	return scale_delta(delta, src->tsc_to_system_mul, src->tsc_shift);
> }
>
>
> xen refreshes the values in pvclock_vcpu_time_info every EPOCH (1s),
> therefore if the value returned by pvclock_get_nsec_offset is greater
> than EPOCH than the patch is not present in xen.
>
> This is a simple way of detecting if the offset is taken into account or
> not and it works because the offset is the value returned by rdtsc in
> the host when the VM was created and we can be sure it corresponds to
> more than 1 sec.
>    

That seems pretty fragile.  I don't think EPOCH is part of the ABI, and 
I don't think we should be relying on it.

     J