Re: Detecting x86 LAPIC timer frequency from CPUID data

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Thu Apr 18 2019 - 09:12:17 EST


On Wed, 17 Apr 2019, Daniel Drake wrote:

> The CPUID.0x16 leaf provides "Bus (Reference) Frequency (in MHz)".
>
> In the thread "No 8254 PIT & no HPET on new Intel N3350 platforms
> causes kernel panic during early boot" we are exploring ways to have
> the kernel avoid using the PIT/HPET IRQ0 timer in more cases, and
> Thomas Gleixner suggested that we could use this CPUID data to set
> lapic_timer_frequency, avoiding the need for calibrate_APIC_clock()
> to measure the APIC clock against the IRQ0 timer.
>
> I'm thinking of the the following code change, however I get
> unexpected results on Intel i7-8565U (Whiskey Lake). When
> booting without this change, and with apic=notscdeadline (so that
> APIC clock gets calibrated and used), the bus speed is detected as
> 23MHz:
>
> ... lapic delta = 149994
> ... PM-Timer delta = 357939
> ... PM-Timer result ok
> ..... delta 149994
> ..... mult: 6442193
> ..... calibration result: 23999
> ..... CPU clock speed is 1991.0916 MHz.
> ..... host bus clock speed is 23.0999 MHz.
>
> However the CPUID.0x16 ECX reports a 100MHz bus speed on this device,
> so this code change would produce a significantly different calibration.
>
> Am I doing anything obviously wrong?

It's probably just my fault sending you down the wrong path. What's the
content of CPUUD.0x15 on that box?

Thanks,

tglx