Re: [PATCH v6 1/4] sched/clock: interface to allow timestamps early in boot

Peter Zijlstra
2017-09-27T18:10:04Z

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 08:05:48PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 09:52:36PM +0800, Dou Liyang wrote:
> > We do not want to do that. Because, we use "notsc" to support Dynamic
> > Reconfiguration[1].
> >
> > AFAIK, this feature enables hot-add system board which contains CPUs
> > and memories. But the CPUs in different board may have different TSCs
> > which are not consistent with the TSC from the existing CPUs. If we hot-add
> > a board directly, the machine may happen the inconsistency of
> > TSC.
> >
> > We make our effort to specify the same TSC value as existing one through
> > hardware and firmware, but it is hard. So we recommend to specify
> > "notsc" option in command line for users who want to use Dynamic
> > Reconfiguration.
>
> Oh gawd, that's horrific. And in my book a good reason to kill that
> option.

That is, even with unsynchronized TSC we're better off using RDTSC. The
whole mess in kernel/sched/clock.c is all about getting semi sensible
results out of unsynchronized TSC.

There really is no reason to artificially kill TSC usage.