Re: constant_tsc and TSC unstable

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Fri Nov 30 2007 - 02:07:06 EST


Paul Rolland (ããããããã) wrote:

Note that once TSC is disabled (it's using "jiffies" as far
as I can see), ntpd constantly speeds up and slows down the
clock, it jumps +/- 0.5sec every several minutes or hours -
I guess that's when ntpd process gets moved from one core
to another for whatever reason. And an interesting thing
is that with 64bits kernel this TSC problem does not occur
on this very machine.
Hmmmm.... That could make it a problem related to kernel rather than CPU.
Something similar is reported on AMD X2 64 machines as well --
can't check right now.
If I recall correctly, issues with AMD X2 where related to TSC being
independant for each core and not constant (speed depending of C state).
But the reason I raise the issue is that the Core2 reports constant TSC,
so there is (IMHO) no reason for that.


Well, "constant" doesn't mean "synchronized", but it might very well be that the Core2 could really benefit from synchronizing the TSCs manually like we used to.

On the other hand, I notice that most of the TSC warp values are relatively close to 2^32, so this could be a specific bug.

-hpa

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