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From: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Cc: Tim Mann <mann@vmware.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [-mm PATCH] time: fix time going backward w/ clock=pit
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 17:09:55 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1148602195.7813.18.camel@leatherman> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20060518011116.68055275.akpm@osdl.org>

On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 01:11 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Tim Mann <mann@vmware.com> wrote:
> >
> >  Currently, if you boot with clock=pit on the kernel command line and
> >  run a program that loops calling gettimeofday, on many machines you'll
> >  observe that time frequently goes backward by about one jiffy.  This
> >  patch fixes that symptom and also some other related bugs.
> 
> And for 2.6.18 we're hoping to get John's x86 timer rework merged up. 
> John, do those patches address this bug?
> 
> So if we decide these two patches are not-for-2.6.17 then I'll sit on them
> until we decide whether or not to merge John's patches.  If we do, and if
> those patches fix this problem then your two patches aren't needed.  If
> John's patches don't get merged then I'll need to merge these two.

Hey Andrew,
	Sorry I've been so slow here, just starting to recover from a  one week
+ flu. :P  Here is the PIT fix against the TOD patches that Tim pointed
out. Many thanks to Tim for hunting this down.

thanks
-john

Signed-off-by: John Stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>

Index: devmm/arch/i386/kernel/i8253.c
===================================================================
--- devmm.orig/arch/i386/kernel/i8253.c	2006-05-25 18:12:41.000000000 -0500
+++ devmm/arch/i386/kernel/i8253.c	2006-05-25 18:52:31.000000000 -0500
@@ -41,9 +41,25 @@
 {
 	unsigned long flags;
 	int count;
-	u64 jifs;
+	u32 jifs;
+	static int old_count;
+	static u32 old_jifs;
 
 	spin_lock_irqsave(&i8253_lock, flags);
+        /*
+	 * Although our caller may have the read side of xtime_lock,
+	 * this is now a seqlock, and we are cheating in this routine
+	 * by having side effects on state that we cannot undo if
+	 * there is a collision on the seqlock and our caller has to
+	 * retry.  (Namely, old_jifs and old_count.)  So we must treat
+	 * jiffies as volatile despite the lock.  We read jiffies
+	 * before latching the timer count to guarantee that although
+	 * the jiffies value might be older than the count (that is,
+	 * the counter may underflow between the last point where
+	 * jiffies was incremented and the point where we latch the
+	 * count), it cannot be newer.
+	 */
+	jifs = jiffies;
 	outb_p(0x00, PIT_MODE);	/* latch the count ASAP */
 	count = inb_p(PIT_CH0);	/* read the latched count */
 	count |= inb_p(PIT_CH0) << 8;
@@ -55,12 +71,29 @@
 		outb(LATCH >> 8, PIT_CH0);
 		count = LATCH - 1;
 	}
-	spin_unlock_irqrestore(&i8253_lock, flags);
 
-	jifs = jiffies_64;
+	/*
+	 * It's possible for count to appear to go the wrong way for a
+	 * couple of reasons:
+	 *
+	 *  1. The timer counter underflows, but we haven't handled the
+	 *     resulting interrupt and incremented jiffies yet.
+	 *  2. Hardware problem with the timer, not giving us continuous time,
+	 *     the counter does small "jumps" upwards on some Pentium systems,
+	 *     (see c't 95/10 page 335 for Neptun bug.)
+	 *
+	 * Previous attempts to handle these cases intelligently were
+	 * buggy, so we just do the simple thing now.
+	 */
+	if (count > old_count && jifs == old_jifs) {
+		count = old_count;
+	}
+	old_count = count;
+	old_jifs = jifs;
+
+	spin_unlock_irqrestore(&i8253_lock, flags);
 
-	jifs -= INITIAL_JIFFIES;
-	count = (LATCH-1) - count;
+	count = (LATCH - 1) - count;
 
 	return (cycle_t)(jifs * LATCH) + count;
 }
@@ -69,7 +102,7 @@
 	.name	= "pit",
 	.rating = 110,
 	.read	= pit_read,
-	.mask	= CLOCKSOURCE_MASK(64),
+	.mask	= CLOCKSOURCE_MASK(32),
 	.mult	= 0,
 	.shift	= 20,
 };



  parent reply	other threads:[~2006-05-26  0:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2006-05-17 23:04 Fix time going backward with clock=pit [1/2] Tim Mann
2006-05-17 23:06 ` Fix time going backward with clock=pit [2/2] Tim Mann
2006-05-18  8:11 ` Fix time going backward with clock=pit [1/2] Andrew Morton
2006-05-19  1:54   ` Tim Mann
2006-05-26  0:09   ` john stultz [this message]
2006-05-18 11:51 ` Roman Zippel
2006-05-18 18:50   ` Tim Mann
2006-05-19  0:09     ` Roman Zippel
2006-05-19  2:02       ` Tim Mann
2006-05-19 15:31         ` Roman Zippel
2006-05-19 23:13           ` Tim Mann

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