clocksource: Suspend the watchdog temporarily when high read latency detected
Bugs have been reported on 8 sockets x86 machines in which the TSC was wrongly disabled when the system is under heavy workload. [ 818.380354] clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU336: hpet wd-wd read-back delay of 1203520ns [ 818.436160] clocksource: wd-tsc-wd read-back delay of 181880ns, clock-skew test skipped! [ 819.402962] clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU338: hpet wd-wd read-back delay of 324000ns [ 819.448036] clocksource: wd-tsc-wd read-back delay of 337240ns, clock-skew test skipped! [ 819.880863] clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU339: hpet read-back delay of 150280ns, attempt 3, marking unstable [ 819.936243] tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog [ 820.068173] TSC found unstable after boot, most likely due to broken BIOS. Use 'tsc=unstable'. [ 820.092382] sched_clock: Marking unstable (818769414384, 1195404998) [ 820.643627] clocksource: Checking clocksource tsc synchronization from CPU 267 to CPUs 0,4,25,70,126,430,557,564. [ 821.067990] clocksource: Switched to clocksource hpet This can be reproduced by running memory intensive 'stream' tests, or some of the stress-ng subcases such as 'ioport'. The reason for these issues is the when system is under heavy load, the read latency of the clocksources can be very high. Even lightweight TSC reads can show high latencies, and latencies are much worse for external clocksources such as HPET or the APIC PM timer. These latencies can result in false-positive clocksource-unstable determinations. These issues were initially reported by a customer running on a production system, and this problem was reproduced on several generations of Xeon servers, especially when running the stress-ng test. These Xeon servers were not production systems, but they did have the latest steppings and firmware. Given that the clocksource watchdog is a continual diagnostic check with frequency of twice a second, there is no need to rush it when the system is under heavy load. Therefore, when high clocksource read latencies are detected, suspend the watchdog timer for 5 minutes. Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com> Acked-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> Cc: John Stultz <jstultz@google.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Stephen Boyd <sboyd@kernel.org> Cc: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
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