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Message-ID: <Z-qsg6iDGlcIJulJ@localhost>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2025 16:53:55 +0200
From: Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@...hat.com>
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Cc: John Stultz <jstultz@...gle.com>, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Stephen Boyd <sboyd@...nel.org>,
Anna-Maria Behnsen <anna-maria@...utronix.de>,
Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@...nel.org>,
Shuah Khan <shuah@...nel.org>, linux-kselftest@...r.kernel.org,
kernel-team@...roid.com, Lei Chen <lei.chen@...rtx.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] time/timekeeping: Fix possible inconsistencies in
_COARSE clockids
On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 04:42:49PM +0100, Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
> Maybe I could simply patch the kernel to force a small clock
> multiplier to increase the rate at which the error accumulates.
I tried that and it indeed makes the issue clearly visible. The COARSE
fix makes the clock less stable. It's barely visible with the normal
multiplier, at least for the clocksource I tested, but a reduced
multiplier forces a larger NTP error and raises it above the precision
and instability of the system and reference clocks.
The test was done on a machine with a TSC clocksource (3GHz CPU with
disabled frequency scaling - normal multplier is 5592407) and tried a
multiplier reduced by 4, 16, 64 with this COARSE-fixing patch not
applied and applied. Each test ran for 1 minute and produced an
average value of skew - stability of the clock frequency as reported
by chronyd in the tracking log when synchronizing to a free-running
PTP clock at 64, 16, and 4 updates per second. It's in parts per
million (resolution in the chrony log is limited to 0.001 ppm).
Mult reduction Updates/sec Skew before Skew after
1 4 0.000 0.000
1 16 0.001 0.002
1 64 0.002 0.006
4 4 0.001 0.001
4 16 0.003 0.005
4 64 0.005 0.015
16 4 0.004 0.009
16 16 0.011 0.069
16 64 0.020 0.117
64 4 0.013 0.012
64 16 0.030 0.107
64 64 0.058 0.879
--
Miroslav Lichvar
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