Timothy Miller wrote:
> Is there any way the kernel could detect clock problems like drift and
> jumps by comparing the effects of different timers? And when a problem
> is detected, it can correct the situation automatically.
>
> How many interrupt timers are there in various systems? How much can we
> rely on the accuracy of each one?
>
In my high-res-timers model I don't rely on interrupts to "clock"
time, but rather pick some stable time source such as the ACPIC
pm_timer. The interrupts are just used to remind the system to read
the clock.
In this model, the gettimeofday() request just reads that clock.
There is also code to keep the interrupts occurring on the proper
"boundaries" as defined by that clock.
The problem is finding a stable fast (as in time to read) clock
source. The TSC is not stable in a fair number of machines. The
pm_timer is an I/O access which is sloooow and will only get slower
WRT cpu cycle time as the boxes get faster.
Archs other than the x86 seem to do much better in this regard.
As for fixing what is in the x86 now, I would suggest that, if we are
using the TSC, we trust it with a bit of a longer time than the tick
time. It is relatively easy to detect drift WRT the PIT and correct
the TSC base line, but this should be done over a second or so and not
each tick as is done now. This would eliminate the PIT as well as the
TSC reference read at each interrupt and result in a more stable result.
To work correctly with NTP we would also need to adjust the TSC to
useconds multiplier to match what NTP thinks the TSC rate should be at
the moment.
I don't know if this work should be attempted at this point in the
development cycle, however. Possibly waiting for 2.7 is better.
>
-- George Anzinger george@mvista.com High-res-timers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/ Preemption patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 07 2003 - 22:00:34 EST