Re: [PATCH] x86/tsc: Don't use cpuid 0x16 leaf to determine cpu speed.

[Krzysztof Piecuch]

Thank you for your reply.

I experience 2% tsc clock-drift (671s ahead of my local NTP server after 9.5h)
on my machine with Supermicro's Hyperspeed turned on. There's no clock
drift when I turn Hyperspeed off.

As far as I know Hyperspeed increases base clock frequency[1].

That's what CPUID says about my overclocked Intel Xeon Gold 6146:

   Time Stamp Counter/Core Crystal Clock Information (0x15):
      TSC/clock ratio = 256/2
      nominal core crystal clock = 0 Hz
   Processor Frequency Information (0x16):
      Core Base Frequency (MHz) = 0xc80 (3200)
      Core Maximum Frequency (MHz) = 0x1068 (4200)
      Bus (Reference) Frequency (MHz) = 0x64 (100)

tsc_refine_calibration_work never corrects the early calibration
because it calculates a tsc frequency beyond 1% tolerance.

I've bumped the tsc_refine_calibration_work's tolerance to 3% and made it work:

Hyperspeed:
[    8.571471] tsc: Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 3264.012 MHz
No hyperspeed:
[    8.506009] tsc: Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 3200.013 MHz

Increasing the tolerance to 3% would work in my case but apparently some
servers can increase the base-clock frequency to 6%. [2]
At this point in order to completely eliminate this bug we would need to
significantly increase the tolerance which might introduce other bugs.

[1]: https://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=21337
[2]: https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-hyper-speed-server-overclocking-bios/

Kind regards,
Krzysztof Piecuch