- Introduce support for auxiliary timekeepers
PTP clocks can be disconnected from the universal CLOCK_TAI reality
for various reasons including regularatory requirements for
functional safety redundancy.
The kernel so far only supports a single notion of time, which means
that all clocks are correlated in frequency and only differ by
offset to each other.
Access to non-correlated PTP clocks has been available so far only
through the file descriptor based "POSIX clock IDs", which are
subject to locking and have to go all the way out to the hardware.
The access is not only horribly slow, as it has to go all the way out
to the NIC/PTP hardware, but that also prevents the kernel to read
the time of such clocks e.g. from the network stack, where it is
required for TSN networking both on the transmit and receive side
unless the hardware provides offloading.
The auxiliary clocks provide a mechanism to support arbitrary clocks
which are not correlated to the system clock. This is not restricted
to the PTP use case on purpose as there is no kernel side association
of these clocks to a particular PTP device because that's a pure user
space configuration decision. Having them independent allows to
utilize them for other purposes and also enables them to be tested
without hardware dependencies.
To avoid pointless overhead these clocks have to be enabled
individualy via a new sysfs interface to reduce the overhead to a
single compare in the hotpath if they are enabled at the Kconfig
level at all.
These clocks utilize the existing timekeeping/NTP infrastructures,
which has been made possible over the recent releases by incrementaly
converting these infrastructures over from a single static instance
to a multi-instance pointer based implementation without any
performance regression reported.
The auxiliary clocks provide the same "emulation" of a "correct"
clock as the existing CLOCK_* variants do with an independent
instance of data and provide the same steering mechanism through the
existing sys_clock_adjtime() interface, which has been confirmed to
work by the chronyd(8) maintainer.
That allows to provide lockless kernel internal and VDSO support so
that applications and kernel internal functionalities can access
these clocks without restrictions and at the same performance as the
existing system clocks.
- Avoid double notifications in the adjtimex() syscall. Not a big issue,
but a trivial to avoid latency source.
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Merge tag 'timers-ptp-2025-07-27' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip
Pull timekeeping and VDSO updates from Thomas Gleixner:
- Introduce support for auxiliary timekeepers
PTP clocks can be disconnected from the universal CLOCK_TAI reality
for various reasons including regularatory requirements for
functional safety redundancy.
The kernel so far only supports a single notion of time, which means
that all clocks are correlated in frequency and only differ by offset
to each other.
Access to non-correlated PTP clocks has been available so far only
through the file descriptor based "POSIX clock IDs", which are
subject to locking and have to go all the way out to the hardware.
The access is not only horribly slow, as it has to go all the way out
to the NIC/PTP hardware, but that also prevents the kernel to read
the time of such clocks e.g. from the network stack, where it is
required for TSN networking both on the transmit and receive side
unless the hardware provides offloading.
The auxiliary clocks provide a mechanism to support arbitrary clocks
which are not correlated to the system clock. This is not restricted
to the PTP use case on purpose as there is no kernel side association
of these clocks to a particular PTP device because that's a pure user
space configuration decision. Having them independent allows to
utilize them for other purposes and also enables them to be tested
without hardware dependencies.
To avoid pointless overhead these clocks have to be enabled
individualy via a new sysfs interface to reduce the overhead to a
single compare in the hotpath if they are enabled at the Kconfig
level at all.
These clocks utilize the existing timekeeping/NTP infrastructures,
which has been made possible over the recent releases by incrementaly
converting these infrastructures over from a single static instance
to a multi-instance pointer based implementation without any
performance regression reported.
The auxiliary clocks provide the same "emulation" of a "correct"
clock as the existing CLOCK_* variants do with an independent
instance of data and provide the same steering mechanism through the
existing sys_clock_adjtime() interface, which has been confirmed to
work by the chronyd(8) maintainer.
That allows to provide lockless kernel internal and VDSO support so
that applications and kernel internal functionalities can access
these clocks without restrictions and at the same performance as the
existing system clocks.
- Avoid double notifications in the adjtimex() syscall. Not a big
issue, but a trivial to avoid latency source.
* tag 'timers-ptp-2025-07-27' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip: (39 commits)
vdso/gettimeofday: Add support for auxiliary clocks
vdso/vsyscall: Update auxiliary clock data in the datapage
vdso: Introduce aux_clock_resolution_ns()
vdso/gettimeofday: Introduce vdso_get_timestamp()
vdso/gettimeofday: Introduce vdso_set_timespec()
vdso/gettimeofday: Introduce vdso_clockid_valid()
vdso/gettimeofday: Return bool from clock_gettime() helpers
vdso/gettimeofday: Return bool from clock_getres() helpers
vdso/helpers: Add helpers for seqlocks of single vdso_clock
vdso/vsyscall: Split up __arch_update_vsyscall() into __arch_update_vdso_clock()
vdso/vsyscall: Introduce a helper to fill clock configurations
timekeeping: Remove the temporary CLOCK_AUX workaround
timekeeping: Provide ktime_get_clock_ts64()
timekeeping: Provide interface to control auxiliary clocks
timekeeping: Provide update for auxiliary timekeepers
timekeeping: Provide adjtimex() for auxiliary clocks
timekeeping: Prepare do_adtimex() for auxiliary clocks
timekeeping: Make do_adjtimex() reusable
timekeeping: Add auxiliary clock support to __timekeeping_inject_offset()
timekeeping: Make timekeeping_inject_offset() reusable
...
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