[PATCH v4.16-rc6 (1)] x86/vdso: VDSO should handle clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW) without syscall

From: jason . vas . dias
Date: Wed Mar 21 2018 - 12:32:21 EST



Resent to address reviewer comments, and allow builds with compilers
that support -DRETPOLINE to succeed.

Currently, the VDSO does not handle
clock_gettime( CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, &ts )
on Intel / AMD - it calls
vdso_fallback_gettime()
for this clock, which issues a syscall, having an unacceptably high
latency (minimum measurable time or time between measurements)
of 300-700ns on 2 2.8-3.9ghz Haswell x86_64 Family'_'Model : 06_3C
machines under various versions of Linux.

Sometimes, particularly when correlating elapsed time to performance
counter values, user-space code needs to know elapsed time from the
perspective of the CPU no matter how "hot" / fast or "cold" / slow it
might be running wrt NTP / PTP "real" time; when code needs this,
the latencies associated with a syscall are often unacceptably high.

I reported this as Bug #198161 :
'https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198961'
and in previous posts with subjects matching 'CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW' .

This patch handles CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW clock_gettime() in the VDSO ,
by exporting the raw clock calibration, last cycles, last xtime_nsec,
and last raw_sec value in the vsyscall_gtod_data during vsyscall_update() .
Now the new do_monotonic_raw() function in the vDSO has a latency of @ 20ns
on average, and the test program:
tools/testing/selftest/timers/inconsistency-check.c
succeeds with arguments: '-c 4 -t 120' or any arbitrary -t value.

The patch is against Linus' latest 4.16-rc6 tree,
current HEAD of :
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
.

This patch affects only files:
arch/x86/include/asm/vgtod.h
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.c
arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c

Patches for kernels 3.10.0-21 and 4.9.65-rt23 (ARM) are attached to bug
#198161,
as is the test program, timer_latency.c, to demonstrate the problem.

Before the patch a latency of 200-1000ns was measured for
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW,&ts)
calls - after the patch, the same call on the same machine
has a latency of @ 20ns.

Please consider applying something like this patch to a future Linux release.

This patch is being resent because it has slight improvements to vclock_gettime
static function attributes wrt. the previous version.

It also supersedes all previous patches with subject matching
'.*VDSO should handle.*clock_gettime.*MONOTONIC_RAW'
that I have sent previously - sorry for the resends.

Please apply this patch so we stop getting emails from
intel build bot trying to build previous version, with
subject :
'[PATCH v4.16-rc5 1/2] x86/vdso: VDSO should handle \
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW) without syscall'
, which only fails to build because its patch 2/2 , which
removed -DRETPOLINE from the VDSO build, and is now the
subject of https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199129,
raised by H.J. Liu, was not applied first - Sorry!

Thanks & Best Regards,
Jason Vas Dias