Re: gettimeofday() jumping into the future

[Gerald Britton]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 01:08:27PM +0200, Michael Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We've been seeing some strange behaviour on some of our applications
> recently. I've tracked this down to gettimeofday() returning spurious
> values occasionally.
> 
> Specifically, gettimeofday() will suddenly, for a single call, return
> a value about 4398 seconds (~1 hour 13 minutes) in the future. The
> following call goes back to a normal value.

I have seen this as well (on a 2.6.20.4 kernel).  The value returned was
always identical each time the glitch occured (just a little over 4398
seconds).  I saw it watching packet receive timestamps and on the system in
question, it would generally hit this problem around once a minute.  When
moving forward to a 2.6.21 kernel, the problem seemed to go away (also back
to 2.6.17, unfortunately I didn't have any sample points inbetween).
I didn't have free time to spend bisecting attempting to find when the
behavior started or stopped.

The hardware in this case was an HP Proliant DL380 G5 with two dueal-core
Core2 processors and was using the tsc as timesource.

				-- Gerald

> This seems to be occurring when the clock source goes slightly
> backwards for a single call. In
> kernel/time/timekeeping.c:__get_nsec_offset(), we have this:
>  cycle_delta = (cycle_now - clock->cycle_last) & clock->mask;
> 
> So a small decrease in time here will (this is all unsigned
> arithmetic) give us a very large cycle_delta. cyc2ns() then multiplies
> this by some value, then right shifts by 22. The resulting value (in
> nanoseconds) is approximately 4398 seconds; this gets added on to the
> xtime value, giving us our jump into the future. The next call to
> gettimeofday() returns to normal as we don't have this huge nanosecond
> offset.
> 
> This system is a 2-socket core 2 quad machine (8 cpus), running 32 bit
> mode. It's a dell poweredge 1950. The kernel selects the TSC as the
> clock source, having determined that the tsc runs synchronously on
> this system. Switching the systems to use a different time source
> seems to make the problem go away (which is fine for us, but we'd like
> to get this fixed properly upstream).
> 
> We've also seen this behaviour with a synthetic test program (which
> just runs 4 threads all calling gettimeofday() in a loop as fast as
> possible and testing that it doesn't jump) on an older machine, a dell
> poweredge SC1425 with two p4 hyperthreaded xeons.
> 
> Can anyone advise on what's going wrong here? I can't find much in the
> way of documentation on whether the TSC is guaranteed to be
> monotonically increasing on intel systems. Should the code choose not
> to use the TSC? Or should the TSC reading code ensure that the
> returned values are monotonic?
> 
> Is there any more information that would be useful? I'll be on a plane
> for most of tomorrow, so might be a little slow responding.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike
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