From 2ed08e4bc53298db3f87b528cd804cb0cce066a9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Feng Tang Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:08:59 +0800 Subject: clocksource: Scale the watchdog read retries automatically 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 Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner Tested-by: Jin Wang Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney Reviewed-by: Waiman Long Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240221060859.1027450-1-feng.tang@intel.com --- Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 6 ------ 1 file changed, 6 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation/admin-guide') diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt index 31b3a25680d0..763e96dcf8b1 100644 --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt @@ -679,12 +679,6 @@ loops can be debugged more effectively on production systems. - clocksource.max_cswd_read_retries= [KNL] - Number of clocksource_watchdog() retries due to - external delays before the clock will be marked - unstable. Defaults to two retries, that is, - three attempts to read the clock under test. - clocksource.verify_n_cpus= [KNL] Limit the number of CPUs checked for clocksources marked with CLOCK_SOURCE_VERIFY_PERCPU that -- cgit v1.2.3