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Heiko Carstens authored
arch_cpu_idle_time() returns the idle time of any given cpu if it is in idle, or zero if not. All if this is racy and partially incorrect. Time stamps taken with store clock extended and store clock fast from different cpus are compared, while the architecture states that this is nothing which can be relied on (see Principles of Operation; Chapter 4, "Setting and Inspecting the Clock"). A more fundamental problem is that the timestamp when a cpu is leaving idle is taken early in the assembler part of the interrupt handler, and this value is only transferred many cycles later to the cpu's per-cpu idle data structure. This per cpu data structure is read by arch_cpu_idle() to tell for which period of time a remote cpu is idle: if only an idle_enter value is present, the assumed idle time of the cpu is calculated by taking a local timestamp and returning the difference of the local timestamp and the idle_enter value. This is potentially incorrect, since the remote cpu may have already left idle, but the taken timestamp may not have been transferred to the per-cpu data structure. This in turn means that too much idle time may be reported for a cpu, and a subsequent calculation of system idle time may result in a smaller value. Instead of coming up with even more complex code trying to fix this, just remove this code, and only account idle time of a cpu, after idle state is left. Another minor bug is that it is assumed that timestamps are non-zero, which is not necessarily the case for timestamps taken with store clock fast. This however is just a very minor problem, since this can only happen when the epoch increases. Reviewed-by:
Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com> Signed-off-by:
Heiko Carstens <hca@linux.ibm.com>
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