Re: [PATCH v6 1/4] sched/clock: interface to allow timestamps early in boot

From: Pasha Tatashin
Date: Thu Sep 28 2017 - 09:13:04 EST


It will be best if we can support TSC sync capability in x86, but seems
is not easy.

Sure, your hardware achieving sync would be best, but even if it does
not, we can still use TSC. Using notsc simple because you fail to sync
TSCs is quite crazy.

The thing is, we need to support unsync'ed TSC in any case, because
older chips (pre Nehalem) didn't have synchronized TSC in any case, and
it still happens on recent chips if the BIOS mucks it up, which happens
surprisingly often :-(

I would suggest you try your reconfigurable setup with "tsc=unstable"
and see if that works for you. That marks the TSC unconditionally
unstable at boot and avoids any further wobbles once the TSC watchdog
notices (although that too _should_ more or less work).

That should do the trick nicely and we might just end up converting notsc
to tsc=unstable silently so we can avoid the bike shed discussions about
removing it.


Ok, I will start working on converting notsc to unstable, and modify my patches to do what Peter suggested earlier. In the mean time, I'd like to hear from Dou if this setup works with dynamic reconfig.

Thank you,
Pasha