The TSC_ADJUST MSR shows whether the TSC has been modified. This is helpful
in two aspects:
1) It allows to detect BIOS wreckage, where SMM code tries to 'hide' the
cycles spent by storing the TSC value at SMM entry and restoring it at
SMM exit. On affected machines the TSCs run slowly out of sync up to the
point where the clocksource watchdog (if available) detects it.
The TSC_ADJUST MSR allows to detect the TSC modification before that and
eventually restore it. This is also important for SoCs which have no
watchdog clocksource and therefore TSC wreckage cannot be detected and
acted upon.
2) All threads in a package are required to have the same TSC_ADJUST
value. Broken BIOSes break that and as a result the TSC synchronization
check fails.
The TSC_ADJUST MSR allows to detect the deviation when a CPU comes
online. If detected set it to the value of an already online CPU in the
same package. This also allows to reduce the number of sync tests
because with that in place the test is only required for the first CPU
in a package.
In principle all CPUs in a system should have the same TSC_ADJUST value
even across packages, but with physical CPU hotplug this assumption is
not true because the TSC starts with power on, so physical hotplug has
to do some trickery to bring the TSC into sync with already running
packages, which requires to use an TSC_ADJUST value different from CPUs
which got powered earlier.
A final enhancement is the opportunity to compensate for unsynced TSCs
accross nodes at boot time and make the TSC usable that way. It won't
help for TSCs which run apart due to frequency skew between packages,
but this gets detected by the clocksource watchdog later.
This patch series implements all of the avove.
Thanks,
tglx
---
include/asm/tsc.h | 8 +
kernel/Makefile | 2
kernel/process.c | 1
kernel/tsc.c | 16 ++-
kernel/tsc_sync.c | 237 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
5 files changed, 244 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)
