Re: [PATCH v2 clocksource 6/7] clocksource: Verify HPET and PMTMR when TSC unverified

Thomas Gleixner
2023-02-01T10:24:21Z

Paul!

On Tue, Jan 24 2023 at 16:27, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On systems with two or fewer sockets, when the boot CPU has CONSTANT_TSC,
> NONSTOP_TSC, and TSC_ADJUST, clocksource watchdog verification of the
> TSC is disabled. This works well much of the time, but there is the
> occasional production-level system that meets all of these criteria, but
> which still has a TSC that skews significantly from atomic-clock time.
> This is usually attributed to a firmware or hardware fault. Yes, the
> various NTP daemons do express their opinions of userspace-to-atomic-clock
> time skew, but they put them in various places, depending on the daemon
> and distro in question. It would therefore be good for the kernel to
> have some clue that there is a problem.
>
> The old behavior of marking the TSC unstable is a non-starter because a
> great many workloads simply cannot tolerate the overheads and latencies
> of the various non-TSC clocksources. In addition, NTP-corrected systems
> sometimes can tolerate significant kernel-space time skew as long as
> the userspace time sources are within epsilon of atomic-clock time.
>
> Therefore, when watchdog verification of TSC is disabled, enable it for
> HPET and PMTMR (AKA ACPI PM timer). This provides the needed in-kernel
> time-skew diagnostic without degrading the system's performance.

I'm more than unhappy about this. We finally have a point where the TSC
watchdog overhead can go away without adding TSC=reliable to the kernel
commandline.

Now you add an unconditionally enforce the watchdog again in a way which
even cannot be disabled on the kernel command line.

Patently bad idea, no cookies for you!

Thanks,

tglx