Re: A Timecounter for Xen

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 12:14:37AM -0400, Jed Davis wrote:
> I have here a patch that adds timecounter support for xen; it's been
> gathering dust in a local tree of mine for a few months, but before
> life happened and I got sidetracked from it, it stood up to a fair
> amount of testing, and it still works.  The changes, while mostly
> localized, are not trivial, so I'm posting them here.
> 
> As always, it returns Xen "system time" -- monotonic nanoseconds since
> boot, measured with the x86 cycle counter and scaling information
> provided and maintained by the hypervisor.
> 
> The main subtlety is that, because a domain might not be scheduled to
> run until some time after the timer interrupt-equivalent should occur,
> if the MI timecounter tick routine (called under hardclock(9)) got the
> actual times, it could miscompute the conversion to wall clock time.
> Thus, the timer event handler arranges to have those timecount values
> offset by the difference, as if the hardclock tick had occurred when
> it was supposed it.
> 
> Also, because such adjustments can't be done for arbitrary other
> timecounters (e.g., ACPI timers in Xen3 dom0), the xen_system_time
> counter assigns itself a very high quality in order to prevent their
> use by default.
> 
> It's not SMP-ready at the moment (and hadn't been before this change),
> but that should be fairly easy to add; it'd be mostly a simple matter
> of moving static globals into cpu_info.

This looks good. Thanks for the work !

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--