From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: clocksource_watchdog causing scheduling of timers every second
 (was [v13] support "task_isolation" mode)
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2016 09:00:27 -0700
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To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>, Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@mellanox.com>, Gilad Ben Yossef <giladb@mellanox.com>, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>, Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>, Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>, Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-api@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 10:40:02AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 12:16:58AM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > I had similar issues, this seems to happen when the tsc is considered not reliable
> > (which doesn't necessarily mean unstable. I think it has to do with some x86 CPU feature
> > flag).
> 
> Right, as per the other email, in general we cannot know/assume the TSC
> to be working as intended :/
> 
> > IIRC, this _has_ to execute on all online CPUs because every TSCs of running CPUs
> > are concerned.
> 
> With modern Intel we could run it on one CPU per package I think, but at
> the same time, too much in NOHZ_FULL assumes the TSC is indeed sane so
> it doesn't make sense to me to keep the watchdog running, when it
> triggers it would also have to kill all NOHZ_FULL stuff, which would
> probably bring the entire machine down..

Well, you -could- force a very low priority CPU-bound task to run on
all nohz_full CPUs.  Not necessarily a good idea, but a relatively
non-intrusive response to that particular error condition.

							Thanx, Paul

> Arguably we should issue a boot time warning if NOHZ_FULL is configured
> and the TSC watchdog is running.
> 
> > I personally override that with passing the tsc=reliable kernel
> > parameter. Of course use it at your own risk.
> 
> Yes, that is (sadly) our only option. Manually assert our hardware is
> solid under the intended workload and then manually disabling the
> watchdog.
>