Skip to content
Commit 8d165db1 authored by Anton Blanchard's avatar Anton Blanchard Committed by Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Browse files

powerpc: Improve decrementer accuracy



I have been looking at sources of OS jitter and notice that after a long
NO_HZ idle period we wakeup too early:

relative time (us)    event
                      timer irq exit
    999946.405        timer irq entry
         4.835        timer irq exit
        21.685        timer irq entry
         3.540          timer (tick_sched_timer) entry

Here we slept for just under a second then took a timer interrupt that did
nothing. 21.685 us later we wake up again and do the work.

We set a rather low shift value of 16 for the decrementer clockevent, which I
think is causing this issue. On this box we have a 207MHz decrementer and see:

clockevent: decrementer mult[3501] shift[16] cpu[0]

For calculations of large intervals this mult/shift combination could be
off by a significant amount. I notice the sparc code has a loop that iterates
to find a mult/shift combination that maximises the shift value while
keeping mult under 32bit. With the patch below we get:

clockevent: decrementer mult[35015c20] shift[32] cpu[15]

And we no longer see the spurious wakeups.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAnton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
parent 9aa4e7b1
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment