RE: [xen-devel] System time monotonicity

["Dan Magenheimer" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Where is the code that does this independent TSC sync'ing?  I see
> > code in smpboot.c that seems to do this at startup (though exactly
> > how I admit I haven't yet figured out... looks like some kind of
> > rendezvous loop triggered by the BP?).  But I don't see where/how
> > this gets called "every couple of seconds", nor do I see any writing
> > to the TSC (except setting BP and each AP to zero at startup).
> 
> arch/x86/time.c:local_time_calibration()

OK, thanks.

If I read the code correctly, Xen goes through this effort to
ensure that the TSC's are synchronized, but maintains this
synchronization in a data structure and doesn't actually
change each processor's physical TSC.  Correct? This is of
course just fine for the hypervisor's timer needs (and thus
indirectly for paravirtualized domains).

But I also observe that all of the hvm platform timer (pit,
hpet, and pmtimer) code is built on top of the physical TSC
plus the vmx/svm tsc_offset which doesn't seem to be affected
by the Xen TSC synchronization.  True?

So assuming the above isn't mistaken, hvm domain reads of the
platform timer on an SMP system lacking hardware-synchronized
TSC may suffer from non-monotonicity.  Correct?

Thanks,
Dan


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