On a 8-socket server the TSC is wrongly marked as 'unstable' and disabled
during boot time on about one out of 120 boot attempts:
clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU227: wd-tsc-wd excessive read-back delay of 153560ns vs. limit of 125000ns,
wd-wd read-back delay only 11440ns, attempt 3, marking tsc unstable
tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog
TSC found unstable after boot, most likely due to broken BIOS. Use 'tsc=unstable'.
sched_clock: Marking unstable (119294969739, 159204297)<-(125446229205, -5992055152)
clocksource: Checking clocksource tsc synchronization from CPU 319 to CPUs 0,99,136,180,210,542,601,896.
clocksource: Switched to clocksource hpet
The reason is that for platform with a large number of CPUs, there are
sporadic big or huge read latencies while reading the watchog/clocksource
during boot or when system is under stress work load, and the frequency and
maximum value of the latency goes up with the number of online CPUs.
The cCurrent code already has logic to detect and filter such high latency
case by reading the watchdog twice and checking the two deltas. Due to the
randomness of the latency, there is a low probabilty that the first delta
(latency) is big, but the second delta is small and looks valid. The
watchdog code retries the readouts by default twice, which is not
necessarily sufficient for systems with a large number of CPUs.
There is a command line parameter 'max_cswd_read_retries' which allows to
increase the number of retries, but that's not user friendly as it needs to
be tweaked per system. As the number of required retries is proportional to
the number of online CPUs, this parameter can be calculated at runtime.
Scale and enlarge the number of retries according to the number of online
CPUs and remove the command line parameter completely.
[ tglx: Massaged change log and comments ]
Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Tested-by: Jin Wang <jin1.wang@intel.com>
Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240221060859.1027450-1-feng.tang@intel.com
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