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Subject: Re: [patch 09/11] x86/vdso: Simplify the invalid vclock case
To:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc:     John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
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        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Matt Rickard <matt@softrans.com.au>,
        Stephen Boyd <sboyd@kernel.org>,
        Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
        "K. Y. Srinivasan" <kys@microsoft.com>,
        Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>,
        devel@linuxdriverproject.org,
        Linux Virtualization <virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>
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From:   Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Message-ID: <06e91c26-756f-f236-0af2-327e520c3065@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Date:   Wed, 19 Sep 2018 11:08:58 +0200
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On 2018-09-19 00:46, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Sep 2018, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>>
>>
>> Do we do better if we use signed arithmetic for the whole calculation?
>> Then a small backwards movement would result in a small backwards result.
>> Or we could offset everything so that we’d have to go back several
>> hundred ms before we cross zero.
> 
> That would be probably the better solution as signed math would be
> problematic when the resulting ns value becomes negative. As the delta is
> really small, otherwise the TSC sync check would have caught it, the caller
> should never be able to observe time going backwards.
> 
> I'll have a look into that. It needs some thought vs. the fractional part
> of the base time, but it should be not rocket science to get that
> correct. Famous last words...

Does the sentinel need to be U64_MAX? What if vgetcyc and its minions
returned gtod->cycle_last-1 (for some value of 1), and the caller just
does "if ((s64)cycles - (s64)last < 0) return fallback; ns +=
(cycles-last)* ...". That should just be a "sub ; js ; ". It's an extra
load of ->cycle_last, but only on the path where we're heading for the
fallback anyway. The value of 1 can be adjusted so that in the "js"
path, we could detect and accept an rdtsc_ordered() call that's just a
few 10s of cycles behind last and treat that as 0 and continue back on
the normal path. But maybe it's hard to get gcc to generate the expected
code.

Rasmus