Re: various laptop nagles - any suggestions? (note:2.6.19-rc2-mm1 but applies to multiple kernels)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 22:37:31 +0200
Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> * Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > > > I don't know how many machines will be affected by this, but I'd 
> > > > expect it's quite a few - the Vaio has a less-than-one-year-old 
> > > > Intel CPU in it.
> > > 
> > > Is this still the broken lapic issue ?
> > 
> > yup.  iirc the standard FC5 SMP kernel runs dog-slowly on that machine 
> > too.
> 
> hm. This is how lapic timer calibration works.
> 
> the lapic timer is really simple - it counts down from a value and 
> generates an irq if that counter reaches 0. Then it starts counting down 
> again.
> 
> the 'count down from' value is programmed via __setup_APIC_LVTT().
> 
> we first write a 'really large' number into it (1 billion):
> 
>         __setup_APIC_LVTT(1000000000);
> 
> the unit of counting is '16 system bus cycles'.
> 
> i.e. if your system has a system bus of 333 MHz, then a value of 1 
> billion takes 48 seconds to count down. (so the calibration ought to be 
> pretty robust in this regard.)
> 
> then we use the wait_timer_tick() function, which waits until the PIT 
> counter reaches 0 (which is attached to the PIT whose frequency we know 
> and thus the PIT is already programmed correctly). Hence by calling 
> wait_timer_tick() we can generate a delay of one jiffy - and we can read 
> out the current lapic timer count and determine the calibration factor.
> 
> then we calculate the result as:
> 
>         result = (tt1-tt2)*APIC_DIVISOR/LOOPS;
> 
> where tt1 is the counter before we start calibration, tt2 is the lapic 
> timer counter after we did calibration. (APIC_DIVISOR is 16)
> 
> i dont see where the error is - but there must be some calibration 
> problem as your system shows a systematic 1:60 difference between 
> expected and real lapic timer frequency.
> 

Oh.  I thought the problem was that the timer stops when the CPU is idle. 
Maybe I misremembered.  I'll try `idle=poll'.
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