• John Stultz's avatar
    jiffies: Remove compile time assumptions about CLOCK_TICK_RATE · b3c869d3
    John Stultz authored
    CLOCK_TICK_RATE is used to accurately caclulate exactly how
    a tick will be at a given HZ.
    
    This is useful, because while we'd expect NSEC_PER_SEC/HZ,
    the underlying hardware will have some granularity limit,
    so we won't be able to have exactly HZ ticks per second.
    
    This slight error can cause timekeeping quality problems
    when using the jiffies or other jiffies driven clocksources.
    Thus we currently use compile time CLOCK_TICK_RATE value to
    generate SHIFTED_HZ and NSEC_PER_JIFFIES, which we then use
    to adjust the jiffies clocksource to correct this error.
    
    Unfortunately though, since CLOCK_TICK_RATE is a compile
    time value, and the jiffies clocksource is registered very
    early during boot, there are a number of cases where there
    are different possible hardware timers that have different
    tick rates. This causes problems in cases like ARM where
    there are numerous different types of hardware, each having
    their own compile-time CLOCK_TICK_RATE, making it hard to
    accurately support different hardware with a single kernel.
    
    For the most part, this doesn't matter all that much, as not
    too many systems actually utilize the jiffies or jiffies driven
    clocksource. Usually there are other highres clocksources
    who's granularity error is negligable.
    
    Even so, we have some complicated calcualtions that we do
    everywhere to handle these edge cases.
    
    This patch removes the compile time SHIFTED_HZ value, and
    introduces a register_refined_jiffies() function. This results
    in the default jiffies clock as being assumed a perfect HZ
    freq, and allows archtectures that care about jiffies accuracy
    to call register_refined_jiffies() with the tick rate, specified
    dynamically at boot.
    
    This allows us, where necessary, to not have a compile time
    CLOCK_TICK_RATE constant, simplifies the jiffies code, and
    still provides a way to have an accurate jiffies clock.
    
    NOTE: Since this patch does not add register_refinied_jiffies()
    calls for every arch, it may cause time quality regressions
    in some cases. Its likely these will not be noticable, but
    if they are an issue, adding the following to the end of
    setup_arch() should resolve the regression:
    	register_refinied_jiffies(CLOCK_TICK_RATE)
    
    Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
    Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
    Cc: Richard Cochran <richardcochran@gmail.com>
    Cc: Prarit Bhargava <prarit@redhat.com>
    Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohn Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
    b3c869d3
jiffies.c 3.7 KB