clocksource: Reduce clocksource-skew threshold

Currently, WATCHDOG_THRESHOLD is set to detect a 62.5-millisecond skew in
a 500-millisecond WATCHDOG_INTERVAL.  This requires that clocks be skewed
by more than 12.5% in order to be marked unstable.  Except that a clock
that is skewed by that much is probably destroying unsuspecting software
right and left.  And given that there are now checks for false-positive
skews due to delays between reading the two clocks, it should be possible
to greatly decrease WATCHDOG_THRESHOLD, at least for fine-grained clocks
such as TSC.

Therefore, add a new uncertainty_margin field to the clocksource structure
that contains the maximum uncertainty in nanoseconds for the corresponding
clock.  This field may be initialized manually, as it is for
clocksource_tsc_early and clocksource_jiffies, which is copied to
refined_jiffies.  If the field is not initialized manually, it will be
computed at clock-registry time as the period of the clock in question
based on the scale and freq parameters to __clocksource_update_freq_scale()
function.  If either of those two parameters are zero, the
tens-of-milliseconds WATCHDOG_THRESHOLD is used as a cowardly alternative
to dividing by zero.  No matter how the uncertainty_margin field is
calculated, it is bounded below by twice WATCHDOG_MAX_SKEW, that is, by 100
microseconds.

Note that manually initialized uncertainty_margin fields are not adjusted,
but there is a WARN_ON_ONCE() that triggers if any such field is less than
twice WATCHDOG_MAX_SKEW.  This WARN_ON_ONCE() is intended to discourage
production use of the one-nanosecond uncertainty_margin values that are
used to test the clock-skew code itself.

The actual clock-skew check uses the sum of the uncertainty_margin fields
of the two clocksource structures being compared.  Integer overflow is
avoided because the largest computed value of the uncertainty_margin
fields is one billion (10^9), and double that value fits into an
unsigned int.  However, if someone manually specifies (say) UINT_MAX,
they will get what they deserve.

Note that the refined_jiffies uncertainty_margin field is initialized to
TICK_NSEC, which means that skew checks involving this clocksource will
be sufficently forgiving.  In a similar vein, the clocksource_tsc_early
uncertainty_margin field is initialized to 32*NSEC_PER_MSEC, which
replicates the current behavior and allows custom setting if needed
in order to address the rare skews detected for this clocksource in
current mainline.

Suggested-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210527190124.440372-4-paulmck@kernel.org

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/clocksource.h b/include/linux/clocksource.h
index 7f83d51c0fd7..895203727cb5 100644
--- a/include/linux/clocksource.h
+++ b/include/linux/clocksource.h
@@ -43,6 +43,8 @@ struct module;
  * @shift:		Cycle to nanosecond divisor (power of two)
  * @max_idle_ns:	Maximum idle time permitted by the clocksource (nsecs)
  * @maxadj:		Maximum adjustment value to mult (~11%)
+ * @uncertainty_margin:	Maximum uncertainty in nanoseconds per half second.
+ *			Zero says to use default WATCHDOG_THRESHOLD.
  * @archdata:		Optional arch-specific data
  * @max_cycles:		Maximum safe cycle value which won't overflow on
  *			multiplication
@@ -98,6 +100,7 @@ struct clocksource {
 	u32			shift;
 	u64			max_idle_ns;
 	u32			maxadj;
+	u32			uncertainty_margin;
 #ifdef CONFIG_ARCH_CLOCKSOURCE_DATA
 	struct arch_clocksource_data archdata;
 #endif