[RFC patch 0/7] printk: Switch to CLOCK_MONOTONIC and store extra time stamps

[Thomas Gleixner]

Following up on yesterdays discussion about adding support for reliably
correlatable time stamps to the printk ringbuffer entries, I split up that
draft patch from yesterday, addressed review feedback and actually tested
it.

There are a few things which are visible changes:

1) The fine grained time stamps start later in the boot process because
   local_clock() is initialized before a high resolution clocksource is
   installed.

2) During suspend/resume between timekeeping_suspend() and
   timekeeping_resume() the NMI safe accessors return a stale timestamp,
   i.e. the timestamp which was captured in timekeeping_suspend()

Mitigation:

 #1 Can be mitigated by a horrible hack, which I added as last patch in the
    series. It uses local_clock() in early boot up to the point where a
    proper clocksource providing fine grained CLOCK_MONOTONIC is
    available. That's actually not that bad, because time won't drift apart.

 #2 Can be mitigated at least for clocksources which are safe to access past
    timekeeping_suspend(). There are patches which enable that for TSC when
    the TSC_NONSTOP_SUSPEND cpu feature bit is enabled.

    For clocksources which cannot be accessed past timekeeping_suspend()
    the workaround #1 can be used (see last patch^Whack). Though this might
    cause time inconsistencies (non monotonic time stamps).

Not sure if any of this is a real problem, because not all
local/sched_clock() implementations are functional past
timekeeping_suspend(). 

I left all 3 time stamps in the patch for now so people can actually play
with that.

Thanks,

	tglx