Re: [RFC patch 15/15] LTTng timestamp x86

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> And if you make all these linear interpolations be per-CPU (so you 
> have per-CPU offsets and frequencies) you never _ever_ need to touch 
> any shared data at all, and you know you can scale basically 
> perfectly.
> 
> Your linear interpolations may not be _perfect_, but you'll be able to 
> get them pretty damn near. In fact, even if the TSC's aren't 
> synchronized at all, if they are at least _individually_ stable (just 
> running at slightly different frequencies because they are in 
> different clock domains, and/or at different start points), you can 
> basically perfect the precision over time.

there's been code submitted by Michael Davidson recently that looked 
interesting, which turns the TSC into such an entity:

    http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/25/451

The periodic synchronization uses the hpet, but it thus allows lockless 
and globally correct readouts of the TSC .

And that would match the long term goal as well: the hw should do this 
all automatically. So perhaps we should have a trace_clock() after all, 
independent of sched_clock(), and derived straight from RDTSC.

The approach as propoed has a couple of practical problems, but if we 
could be one RDTSC+multiplication away from a pretty good timestamp that 
would be rather useful, very fast and very robust ...

	Ingo