Re: clocksource_watchdog causing scheduling of timers every second (was [v13] support "task_isolation" mode)

[Chris Metcalf]

On 8/10/2016 6:16 PM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 08:55:28AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Jul 2016, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> >
> > > Guess so. I will have a look at this when I get some time again.
> > Ok so the problem is the clocksource_watchdog() function in
> > kernel/time/clocksource.c. This function is active if
> > CONFIG_CLOCKSOURCE_WATCHDOG is defined. It will check the timesources of
> > each processor for being within bounds and then reschedule itself on the
> > next one.
> >
> > The purpose of the function seems to be to determine *if* a clocksource is
> > unstable. It does not mean that the clocksource *is* unstable.
> >
> > The critical piece of code is this:
> >
> >          /*
> >           * Cycle through CPUs to check if the CPUs stay synchronized
> >           * to each other.
> >           */
> >          next_cpu = cpumask_next(raw_smp_processor_id(), cpu_online_mask);
> >          if (next_cpu >= nr_cpu_ids)
> >                  next_cpu = cpumask_first(cpu_online_mask);
> >          watchdog_timer.expires += WATCHDOG_INTERVAL;
> >          add_timer_on(&watchdog_timer, next_cpu);
> >
> >
> > Should we just cycle through the cpus that are not isolated? Otherwise we
> > need to have some means to check the clocksources for accuracy remotely
> > (probably impossible for TSC etc).
> >
> > The WATCHDOG_INTERVAL is 1 second so this causes an interrupt every
> > second.
> >
> > Note that we are running with the patch that removes the 1 HZ mininum time
> > tick. With an older kernel code base (redhat) we can keep the kernel quiet
> > for minutes. The clocksource watchdog causes timers to fire again.
> I had similar issues, this seems to happen when the tsc is considered not reliable
> (which doesn't necessarily mean unstable. I think it has to do with some x86 CPU feature
> flag).
>
> IIRC, this _has_ to execute on all online CPUs because every TSCs of running CPUs
> are concerned.
>
> I personally override that with passing the tsc=reliable kernel parameter. Of course
> use it at your own risk.
>
> But eventually I don't think we can offline that to housekeeping only CPUs.

Maybe the eventual model here is that as task-isolation cores
re-enter the kernel, they catch a hook that tells them to go
call the unreliable-tsc stuff and see what the state of it is.

This would be the same hook that we could use to defer
kernel TLB flushes, also.

The hard part is that on some platforms it may be fairly
intrusive to get all the hooks in.  Arm64 has a nice consistent
set of assembly routines to enter the kernel, which is how they
manage the context_tracking as well, but I fear that x86 may
have a lot more.

--
Chris Metcalf, Mellanox Technologies
http://www.mellanox.com