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x86/tsc: Disable clocksource watchdog for TSC on qualified platorms
commit b50db70 upstream. There are cases that the TSC clocksource is wrongly judged as unstable by the clocksource watchdog mechanism which tries to validate the TSC against HPET, PM_TIMER or jiffies. While there is hardly a general reliable way to check the validity of a watchdog, Thomas Gleixner proposed [1]: "I'm inclined to lift that requirement when the CPU has: 1) X86_FEATURE_CONSTANT_TSC 2) X86_FEATURE_NONSTOP_TSC 3) X86_FEATURE_NONSTOP_TSC_S3 4) X86_FEATURE_TSC_ADJUST 5) At max. 4 sockets After two decades of horrors we're finally at a point where TSC seems to be halfway reliable and less abused by BIOS tinkerers. TSC_ADJUST was really key as we can now detect even small modifications reliably and the important point is that we can cure them as well (not pretty but better than all other options)." As feature android-rpi#3 X86_FEATURE_NONSTOP_TSC_S3 only exists on several generations of Atom processorz, and is always coupled with X86_FEATURE_CONSTANT_TSC and X86_FEATURE_NONSTOP_TSC, skip checking it, and also be more defensive to use maximal 2 sockets. The check is done inside tsc_init() before registering 'tsc-early' and 'tsc' clocksources, as there were cases that both of them had been wrongly judged as unreliable. For more background of tsc/watchdog, there is a good summary in [2] [tglx} Update vs. jiffies: On systems where the only remaining clocksource aside of TSC is jiffies there is no way to make this work because that creates a circular dependency. Jiffies accuracy depends on not missing a periodic timer interrupt, which is not guaranteed. That could be detected by TSC, but as TSC is not trusted this cannot be compensated. The consequence is a circulus vitiosus which results in shutting down TSC and falling back to the jiffies clocksource which is even more unreliable. [1]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/ [2]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/ [ tglx: Refine comment and amend changelog ] Fixes: 6e3cd95 ("x86/hpet: Use another crystalball to evaluate HPET usability") Suggested-by: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]> Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
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