x86: quick TSC calibration
Introduce a fast TSC-calibration method on sane hardware. It only uses 17920 PIT timer ticks to calibrate the TSC, plus 256 ticks on each side to make sure the TSC values were very close to the tick, so the whole calibration takes 15ms. Yet, despite only takign 15ms, we can actually give pretty stringent guarantees of accuracy: - the code requires that we hit each 256-counter block at least 50 times, so the TSC error is basically at *MOST* just a few PIT cycles off in any direction. In practice, it's going to be about one microseconds off (which is how long it takes to read the counter) - so over 17920 PIT cycles, we can pretty much guarantee that the calibration error is less than one half of a percent. My testing bears this out: on my machine, the quick-calibration reports 2934.085kHz, while the slow one reports 2933.415. Yes, the slower calibration is still more precise. For me, the slow calibration is stable to within about one hundreth of a percent, so it's (at a guess) roughly an order-and-a-half of magnitude more precise. The longer you wait, the more precise you can be. However, the nice thing about the fast TSC PIT synchronization is that it's pretty much _guaranteed_ to give that 0.5% precision, and fail gracefully (and very quickly) if it doesn't get it. And it really is fairly simple (even if there's a lot of _details_ there, and I didn't get all of those right ont he first try or even the second ;) The patch says "110 insertions", but 63 of those new lines are actually comments. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> --- arch/x86/kernel/tsc.c | 111 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 files changed, 110 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
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