Re: Clock jumps

From: Bernhard Schmidt
Date: Thu May 27 2010 - 20:33:59 EST


On 28.05.2010 02:00, john stultz wrote:

Hi John,

Looking at the diff:
--- dmesg-lenny 2010-05-27 16:45:33.000000000 -0700
+++ dmesg-squeeze 2010-05-27 16:46:14.000000000 -0700
@@ -132,8 +132,8 @@
console [ttyS1] enabled
hpet clockevent registered
Fast TSC calibration using PIT
-Detected 2660.398 MHz processor.
-Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5320.79 BogoMIPS (lpj=10641592)
+Detected 2613.324 MHz processor.
+Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5226.64 BogoMIPS (lpj=10453296)
Security Framework initialized
Dentry cache hash table entries: 524288 (order: 10, 4194304 bytes)
Inode-cache hash table entries: 262144 (order: 9, 2097152 bytes)
@@ -160,7 +160,7 @@
CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3075 @ 2.66GHz stepping 0b
Booting Node 0, Processors #1
Brought up 2 CPUs
-Total of 2 processors activated (10640.79 BogoMIPS).
+Total of 2 processors activated (10546.63 BogoMIPS).
NET: Registered protocol family 16
ACPI: bus type pci registered
PCI: MMCONFIG for domain 0000 [bus 00-ff] at [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff] (base 0xe0000000)

So you can see in the above the during the second boot the TSC
calibration was badly mis-calculated. This was the cause of the skew.

Not sure how that might be linked to the distro upgrade. It could have
been something like SMI damage during the calibration time, but I
thought the calibration loop watched for that.

Bernhard: I expect with all those vms, this machine isn't rebooted
frequently. So could you look at the logs to see how much the "Detected
xxxx.yyy MHz processor." line varies by across a few other boots (if
they still exist?).

Correct, the box isn't rebooted often, but I do have a few dmesg outputs laying around. lpj was always almost the same until the very last boot which screwed up the clock.

dmesg:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.33 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Sun Mar 7 23:01:45 CET 2010
dmesg:[ 0.008005] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5226.64 BogoMIPS (lpj=10453296)
dmesg:[ 0.288002] Total of 2 processors activated (10546.63 BogoMIPS).
dmesg.0:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.33 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Sun Mar 7 23:01:45 CET 2010
dmesg.0:[ 0.008005] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5320.79 BogoMIPS (lpj=10641592)
dmesg.0:[ 0.274022] Total of 2 processors activated (10640.79 BogoMIPS).
dmesg.1.gz:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-rc7 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Thu Nov 19 14:36:03 CET 2009
dmesg.1.gz:[ 0.012004] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5319.06 BogoMIPS (lpj=10638120)
dmesg.1.gz:[ 0.016000] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5319.99 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639980)
dmesg.1.gz:[ 0.260003] Total of 2 processors activated (10639.05 BogoMIPS).
dmesg.2.gz:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-rc7 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Thu Nov 19 14:36:03 CET 2009
dmesg.2.gz:[ 0.012005] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5319.35 BogoMIPS (lpj=10638712)
dmesg.2.gz:[ 0.016000] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5319.99 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639990)
dmesg.2.gz:[ 0.261567] Total of 2 processors activated (10639.35 BogoMIPS).
dmesg.3.gz:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-rc7 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Thu Nov 19 14:36:03 CET 2009
dmesg.3.gz:[ 0.012005] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5319.97 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639956)
dmesg.3.gz:[ 0.016000] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5319.99 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639987)
dmesg.3.gz:[ 0.257152] Total of 2 processors activated (10639.97 BogoMIPS).
dmesg.4.gz:[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-rc7 (root@svr02) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) ) #1 SMP Thu Nov 19 14:36:03 CET 2009
dmesg.4.gz:[ 0.012005] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 5319.84 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639688)
dmesg.4.gz:[ 0.016000] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5319.99 BogoMIPS (lpj=10639993)
dmesg.4.gz:[ 0.253571] Total of 2 processors activated (10639.84 BogoMIPS).

If necessary I can reboot once more, but I'd like to avoid it.

Bernhard
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