linux/arch/x86
Linus Torvalds 6ac40ed041 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(-)
2008-09-04 22:54:50 +02:00
..
boot x86: fix build warnings in real mode code 2008-08-18 09:20:14 +02:00
configs x86: update defconfigs 2008-08-27 08:14:17 +02:00
crypto [CRYPTO] aes-x86-32: Remove unused return code 2008-04-21 10:19:21 +08:00
ia32 tracehook: exec 2008-07-26 12:00:08 -07:00
kernel x86: quick TSC calibration 2008-09-04 22:54:50 +02:00
kvm KVM: MMU: Fix torn shadow pte 2008-08-25 17:24:27 +03:00
lguest lguest: set max_pfn_mapped, growl loudly at Yinghai Lu 2008-07-29 09:58:31 +10:00
lib x86: msr: propagate errors from smp_call_function_single() 2008-08-25 17:45:48 -07:00
mach-default x86: add ->pre_time_init to x86_quirks 2008-07-20 09:25:52 +02:00
mach-es7000 x86: move the last Dprintk instance to pr_debug() 2008-07-21 21:58:34 +02:00
mach-generic x86: make generic arch support NUMAQ, fix 2008-07-08 10:35:45 +02:00
mach-rdc321x removed unused #include <linux/version.h>'s 2008-08-23 12:14:12 -07:00
mach-voyager Merge branch 'generic-ipi' into generic-ipi-for-linus 2008-07-15 21:55:59 +02:00
math-emu x86: coding style fixes to arch/x86/math-emu/reg_constant 2008-06-18 15:00:13 +02:00
mm x86: fix two modpost warnings in mm/init_64.c 2008-08-22 07:51:54 +02:00
oprofile x86: fix oprofile + hibernation badness 2008-08-20 16:18:31 +02:00
pci Un-break printk strings in x86 PCI probing code 2008-09-02 10:38:28 -07:00
power x86: fix i486 suspend to disk CR4 oops 2008-08-18 08:50:19 +02:00
vdso Merge branches 'x86/urgent', 'x86/amd-iommu', 'x86/apic', 'x86/cleanups', 'x86/core', 'x86/cpu', 'x86/fixmap', 'x86/gart', 'x86/kprobes', 'x86/memtest', 'x86/modules', 'x86/nmi', 'x86/pat', 'x86/reboot', 'x86/setup', 'x86/step', 'x86/unify-pci', 'x86/uv', 'x86/xen' and 'xen-64bit' into x86/for-linus 2008-07-21 16:37:17 +02:00
video x86: video/fbdev.c: add MODULE_LICENSE 2008-05-04 20:04:46 +02:00
xen xen: don't use sysret for sysexit32 2008-07-24 12:28:12 +02:00
Kconfig [x86] Clean up MAXSMP Kconfig, and limit NR_CPUS to 512 2008-08-25 14:15:38 -07:00
Kconfig.cpu x86: fix crash due to missing debugctlmsr on AMD K6-3 2008-07-22 14:16:37 +02:00
Kconfig.debug x86: Fix help message for STRICT_DEVMEM config option 2008-07-21 13:04:08 -07:00
Makefile x86, RDC321x: add to mach-default 2008-07-26 13:51:46 +02:00
Makefile_32.cpu