Re: [PATCH] [RFC] clocksource: improve GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS dependency

[Linus Walleij]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 11:10 AM, Russell King - ARM Linux
<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 10:09:51AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
>> For ARM we now have two subarchs not using generic clockevents:
>> RISC PC and EBSA110.
>>
>> I think Russell stated these two cannot be converted to generic clockevents
>> because of hardware limitations I guess, no timer interrupt, simply, which
>> means no clockevents, or unreliable or not granular enough timers.
>>
>> IIUC the SA110 does not contain the built-in SoC goodies of the SA1100
>> so it needs external timer blocks, and those two machines don't have
>> good enough timers.
>
> That's hardly surprising because SA1100 is a SoC, SA110 is just a CPU,
> containing no peripherals at all.
>
> EBSA110 only has one usable timer, which must be programmed to produce
> a regular timer tick to the OS: it's no good trying to double up the
> clocksource and a periodic clockevent onto one counter register - the
> clock source will see the same timer value +/- interrupt latency, and
> in any case it won't wrap in a power-of-2 manner.
>
> This breaks the assumptions behind the clocksource and timekeeping
> code, which are that we have a timer that wraps in a power-of-2
> manner, and which takes much longer than the desired period to wrap.

Aha, that makes perfect sense. Now I finally understand the exact nature
of this problem.

> I think RiscPC may be convertable as there are two timers, and I think
> the second timer is unused (so could be programmed to the requirements
> of a clocksource) but is there much reason to bother given the EBSA110?
> I think there isn't.

The one reason I've seen is that converting to generic clockevents
often makes it simple to also introduce a delay timer at the same time
by just reusing the clocksource timer for it, and that saves the boot-time
loop calibration. (The MOXA ART and Aspeed saw this when I unified
the Faraday timers.)

But in general no.

Yours,
Linus Walleij