linux-kernel - recalibrating x86 TSC during suspend/resume

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Date:   Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:53:02 +0100
From:   Olaf Hering <olaf@...fle.de>
To:     John Stultz <john.stultz@...aro.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Stephen Boyd <sboyd@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: recalibrating x86 TSC during suspend/resume

Is there a way to recalibrate the x86 TSC during a suspend/resume cycle?

While the frequency will remain the same on a Laptop, it may (or rather:
it definitly will) differ if a VM is migrated from one host to another.
The hypervisor may choose to emulate the expected TSC frequency on the
destination host, but this emulation comes with a significant
performance cost. Therefore it would be good if the kernel evaluates the
environment during resume.

The specific usecase I have is a workload within VMs that makes heavy
use of TSC. The kernel is booted with 'clocksource=tsc highres=off nohz=off'
because only this clocksource gives enough granularity. The default
paravirtualized clock will return the same values via
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) if the timespan between two calls is too
short. This does not happen with 'clocksource=tsc'.

Right now it is not possible to migrate VMs to hosts with different CPU
speeds. This leads to "islands" of identical hardware, and makes
maintenance of hosts harder than it needs to be. If the VM kernel would
be able to cope with CPU/TSC frequency changes, the pool of potential
destination hosts will become significant larger.

The current result of a migration with non-emulated TSC between hosts of
different speed is:

[   42.452258] clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU1: Marking clocksource 'tsc' as unstable because the skew is too large:
[   42.452270] clocksource:                       'xen' wd_now: 6d34a86adb wd_last: 6d1dc51793 mask: ffffffffffffffff
[   42.452272] clocksource:                       'tsc' cs_now: 1fd2ce46bb cs_last: 1f95c4ca75 mask: ffffffffffffffff
[   42.452273] tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog

Thanks,
Olaf

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