Re: [patch 09/11] x86/vdso: Simplify the invalid vclock case

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2018, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 09:52:26AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > On Mon, 17 Sep 2018, John Stultz wrote:
> > > On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:25 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > Also, I'm not entirely convinced that this "last" thing is needed at
> > > > all.  John, what's the scenario under which we need it?
> > > 
> > > So my memory is probably a bit foggy, but I recall that as we
> > > accelerated gettimeofday, we found that even on systems that claimed
> > > to have synced TSCs, they were actually just slightly out of sync.
> > > Enough that right after cycles_last had been updated, a read on
> > > another cpu could come in just behind cycles_last, resulting in a
> > > negative interval causing lots of havoc.
> > > 
> > > So the sanity check is needed to avoid that case.
> > 
> > Your memory serves you right. That's indeed observable on CPUs which
> > lack TSC_ADJUST.
> 
> But, if the gtod code can observe this, then why doesn't the code that
> checks the sync?

Because it depends where the involved CPUs are in the topology. The sync
code might just run on the same package an simply not see it. Yes, w/o
TSC_ADJUST the TSC sync code can just fail to see the havoc.

Thanks,

	tglx