time: Implement logarithmic time accumulation

Accumulating one tick at a time works well unless we're using NOHZ.
Then it can be an issue, since we may have to run through the loop
a few thousand times, which can increase timer interrupt caused
latency.

The current solution was to accumulate in half-second intervals
with NOHZ. This kept the number of loops down, however it did
slightly change how we make NTP adjustments. While not an issue
with NTPd users, as NTPd makes adjustments over a longer period of
time, other adjtimex() users have noticed the half-second
granularity with which we can apply frequency changes to the clock.

For instance, if a application tries to apply a 100ppm frequency
correction for 20ms to correct a 2us offset, with NOHZ they either
get no correction, or a 50us correction.

Now, there will always be some granularity error for applying
frequency corrections. However with users sensitive to this error
have seen a 50-500x increase with NOHZ compared to running without
NOHZ.

So I figured I'd try another approach then just simply increasing
the interval. My approach is to consume the time interval
logarithmically. This reduces the number of times through the loop
needed keeping latency down, while still preserving the original
granularity error for adjtimex() changes.

Further, this change allows us to remove the xtime_cache code
(patch to follow), as xtime is always within one tick of the
current time, instead of the half-second updates it saw before.

An earlier version of this patch has been shipping to x86 users in
the RedHat MRG releases for awhile without issue, but I've reworked
this version to be even more careful about avoiding possible
overflows if the shift value gets too large.

Signed-off-by: John Stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: John Kacur <jkacur@redhat.com>
Cc: Clark Williams <williams@redhat.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
LKML-Reference: <1254525473.7741.88.camel@localhost.localdomain>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/timex.h b/include/linux/timex.h
index e6967d1..0c0ef7d 100644
--- a/include/linux/timex.h
+++ b/include/linux/timex.h
@@ -261,11 +261,7 @@ static inline int ntp_synced(void)
 
 #define NTP_SCALE_SHIFT		32
 
-#ifdef CONFIG_NO_HZ
-#define NTP_INTERVAL_FREQ  (2)
-#else
 #define NTP_INTERVAL_FREQ  (HZ)
-#endif
 #define NTP_INTERVAL_LENGTH (NSEC_PER_SEC/NTP_INTERVAL_FREQ)
 
 /* Returns how long ticks are at present, in ns / 2^NTP_SCALE_SHIFT. */