[-mm PATCH] time: fix time going backward w/ clock=pit

From: john stultz
Date: Thu May 25 2006 - 20:09:15 EST


On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 01:11 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Tim Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxx>

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,
};


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