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authorThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>2008-09-03 00:54:47 +0200
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2008-09-02 20:35:56 -0700
commitfbb16e243887332dd5754e48ffe5b963378f3cd2 (patch)
tree774bf58f1d23db0c3f167ff30fb6cdeb674d6980 /drivers
parent8b76f46a2db29407fed66cf4aca19d61b3dcb3e1 (diff)
[x86] Fix TSC calibration issues
Larry Finger reported at http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/1/90: An ancient laptop of mine started throwing errors from b43legacy when I started using 2.6.27 on it. This has been bisected to commit bfc0f59 "x86: merge tsc calibration". The unification of the TSC code adopted mostly the 64bit code, which prefers PMTIMER/HPET over the PIT calibration. Larrys system has an AMD K6 CPU. Such systems are known to have PMTIMER incarnations which run at double speed. This results in a miscalibration of the TSC by factor 0.5. So the resulting calibrated CPU/TSC speed is half of the real CPU speed, which means that the TSC based delay loop will run half the time it should run. That might explain why the b43legacy driver went berserk. On the other hand we know about systems, where the PIT based calibration results in random crap due to heavy SMI/SMM disturbance. On those systems the PMTIMER/HPET based calibration logic with SMI detection shows better results. According to Alok also virtualized systems suffer from the PIT calibration method. The solution is to use a more wreckage aware aproach than the current either/or decision. 1) reimplement the retry loop which was dropped from the 32bit code during the merge. It repeats the calibration and selects the lowest frequency value as this is probably the closest estimate to the real frequency 2) Monitor the delta of the TSC values in the delay loop which waits for the PIT counter to reach zero. If the maximum value is significantly different from the minimum, then we have a pretty safe indicator that the loop was disturbed by an SMI. 3) keep the pmtimer/hpet reference as a backup solution for systems where the SMI disturbance is a permanent point of failure for PIT based calibration 4) do the loop iteration for both methods, record the lowest value and decide after all iterations finished. 5) Set a clear preference to PIT based calibration when the result makes sense. The implementation does the reference calibration based on HPET/PMTIMER around the delay, which is necessary for the PIT anyway, but keeps separate TSC values to ensure the "independency" of the resulting calibration values. Tested on various 32bit/64bit machines including Geode 266Mhz, AMD K6 (affected machine with a double speed pmtimer which I grabbed out of the dump), Pentium class machines and AMD/Intel 64 bit boxen. Bisected-by: Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Tested-by: Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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