Commit Graph

7 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Glauber Costa 3a0d7256a6 x86, paravirt: don't compute pvclock adjustments if we trust the tsc
If the HV told us we can fully trust the TSC, skip any
correction

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
2010-05-19 11:41:05 +03:00
Glauber Costa 489fb490db x86, paravirt: Add a global synchronization point for pvclock
In recent stress tests, it was found that pvclock-based systems
could seriously warp in smp systems. Using ingo's time-warp-test.c,
I could trigger a scenario as bad as 1.5mi warps a minute in some systems.
(to be fair, it wasn't that bad in most of them). Investigating further, I
found out that such warps were caused by the very offset-based calculation
pvclock is based on.

This happens even on some machines that report constant_tsc in its tsc flags,
specially on multi-socket ones.

Two reads of the same kernel timestamp at approx the same time, will likely
have tsc timestamped in different occasions too. This means the delta we
calculate is unpredictable at best, and can probably be smaller in a cpu
that is legitimately reading clock in a forward ocasion.

Some adjustments on the host could make this window less likely to happen,
but still, it pretty much poses as an intrinsic problem of the mechanism.

A while ago, I though about using a shared variable anyway, to hold clock
last state, but gave up due to the high contention locking was likely
to introduce, possibly rendering the thing useless on big machines. I argue,
however, that locking is not necessary.

We do a read-and-return sequence in pvclock, and between read and return,
the global value can have changed. However, it can only have changed
by means of an addition of a positive value. So if we detected that our
clock timestamp is less than the current global, we know that we need to
return a higher one, even though it is not exactly the one we compared to.

OTOH, if we detect we're greater than the current time source, we atomically
replace the value with our new readings. This do causes contention on big
boxes (but big here means *BIG*), but it seems like a good trade off, since
it provide us with a time source guaranteed to be stable wrt time warps.

After this patch is applied, I don't see a single warp in time during 5 days
of execution, in any of the machines I saw them before.

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>
CC: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
CC: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
CC: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
CC: Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
2010-05-19 11:41:00 +03:00
Glauber Costa 424c32f1aa x86, paravirt: Enable pvclock flags in vcpu_time_info structure
This patch removes one padding byte and transform it into a flags
field. New versions of guests using pvclock will query these flags
upon each read.

Flags, however, will only be interpreted when the guest decides to.
It uses the pvclock_valid_flags function to signal that a specific
set of flags should be taken into consideration. Which flags are valid
are usually devised via HV negotiation.

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>
CC: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Acked-by: Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
2010-05-19 11:40:59 +03:00
Dave Jones 2ad76643ff x86: Fix warning in pvclock.c
when building 32-bit, I see this ..
arch/x86/kernel/pvclock.c:63:7: warning: "__x86_64__" is not defined

Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <20090713201437.GA12165@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
2009-07-14 16:25:05 +02:00
Harvey Harrison a08546001c x86: pvclock: fix shadowed variable warning
arch/x86/kernel/pvclock.c:102:6: warning: symbol 'tsc_khz' shadows an earlier one
include/asm/tsc.h:18:21: originally declared here

Signed-off-by: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
2008-10-15 14:25:14 +02:00
Glauber Costa 3807f345b2 x86: paravirt: factor out cpu_khz to common code
KVM intends to use paravirt code to calibrate khz. Xen
current code will do just fine. So as a first step, factor out
code to pvclock.c.

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <gcosta@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
2008-10-15 10:15:17 +02:00
Gerd Hoffmann 7af192c954 x86: Add structs and functions for paravirt clocksource
This patch adds structs for the paravirt clocksource ABI
used by both xen and kvm (pvclock-abi.h).

It also adds some helper functions to read system time and
wall clock time from a paravirtual clocksource (pvclock.[ch]).
They are based on the xen code.  They are enabled using
CONFIG_PARAVIRT_CLOCK.

Subsequent patches of this series will put the code in use.

Signed-off-by: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
2008-06-24 21:02:31 +03:00