timekeeping: Provide fast and NMI safe access to CLOCK_MONOTONIC
Tracers want a correlated time between the kernel instrumentation and user space. We really do not want to export sched_clock() to user space, so we need to provide something sensible for this. Using separate data structures with an non blocking sequence count based update mechanism allows us to do that. The data structure required for the readout has a sequence counter and two copies of the timekeeping data. On the update side: smp_wmb(); tkf->seq++; smp_wmb(); update(tkf->base[0], tk); smp_wmb(); tkf->seq++; smp_wmb(); update(tkf->base[1], tk); On the reader side: do { seq = tkf->seq; smp_rmb(); idx = seq & 0x01; now = now(tkf->base[idx]); smp_rmb(); } while (seq != tkf->seq) So if a NMI hits the update of base[0] it will use base[1] which is still consistent, but this timestamp is not guaranteed to be monotonic across an update. The timestamp is calculated by: now = base_mono + clock_delta * slope So if the update lowers the slope, readers who are forced to the not yet updated second array are still using the old steeper slope. tmono ^ | o n | o n | u | o |o |12345678---> reader order o = old slope u = update n = new slope So reader 6 will observe time going backwards versus reader 5. While other CPUs are likely to be able observe that, the only way for a CPU local observation is when an NMI hits in the middle of the update. Timestamps taken from that NMI context might be ahead of the following timestamps. Callers need to be aware of that and deal with it. V2: Got rid of clock monotonic raw and reorganized the data structures. Folded in the barrier fix from Mathieu. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
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