• Feng Tang's avatar
    clocksource: Scale the watchdog read retries automatically · 2ed08e4b
    Feng Tang authored
    On a 8-socket server the TSC is wrongly marked as 'unstable' and disabled
    during boot time on about one out of 120 boot attempts:
    
        clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU227: wd-tsc-wd excessive read-back delay of 153560ns vs. limit of 125000ns,
        wd-wd read-back delay only 11440ns, attempt 3, marking tsc unstable
        tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog
        TSC found unstable after boot, most likely due to broken BIOS. Use 'tsc=unstable'.
        sched_clock: Marking unstable (119294969739, 159204297)<-(125446229205, -5992055152)
        clocksource: Checking clocksource tsc synchronization from CPU 319 to CPUs 0,99,136,180,210,542,601,896.
        clocksource: Switched to clocksource hpet
    
    The reason is that for platform with a large number of CPUs, there are
    sporadic big or huge read latencies while reading the watchog/clocksource
    during boot or when system is under stress work load, and the frequency and
    maximum value of the latency goes up with the number of online CPUs.
    
    The cCurrent code already has logic to detect and filter such high latency
    case by reading the watchdog twice and checking the two deltas. Due to the
    randomness of the latency, there is a low probabilty that the first delta
    (latency) is big, but the second delta is small and looks valid. The
    watchdog code retries the readouts by default twice, which is not
    necessarily sufficient for systems with a large number of CPUs.
    
    There is a command line parameter 'max_cswd_read_retries' which allows to
    increase the number of retries, but that's not user friendly as it needs to
    be tweaked per system. As the number of required retries is proportional to
    the number of online CPUs, this parameter can be calculated at runtime.
    
    Scale and enlarge the number of retries according to the number of online
    CPUs and remove the command line parameter completely.
    
    [ tglx: Massaged change log and comments ]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarFeng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Tested-by: default avatarJin Wang <jin1.wang@intel.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarWaiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240221060859.1027450-1-feng.tang@intel.com
    2ed08e4b
clocksource-wdtest.c 5.82 KB