Re: [PATCH] ftrace: Provide trace clock monotonic raw

[Drew Richardson <drew.richardson@arm.com>]

On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:09:03PM +0100, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 5 May 2015 07:54:46 -0700
> Drew Richardson <drew.richardson@arm.com> wrote:
>  
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW will advance more constantly than CLOCK_MONOTONIC.
> > 
> > Imagine someone is trying to optimize a particular program to reduce
> > instructions executed for a given workload while minimizing the effect
> > on runtime. Also suppose that ntp is running and potentially making
> > larger adjustments to CLOCK_MONOTONIC. If ntp is adjusting
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC to advance more rapidly, the program will appear to
> > use fewer instructions per second but run longer than it would if
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW had been used. The total number of instructions
> > observed would be the same regardless of the clock source used, but
> > how it's attributed to time would be affected.
> > 
> > Conversely if ntp is adjusting CLOCK_MONOTONIC to advance more slowly,
> > the program will appear to use more instructions per second but run
> > more quickly. Of course there are many sources that can cause jitter
> > in performance measurements on modern processors, but I'd like to
> > remove ntp from the list.
> 
> This is a nice description, and was expecting to see it in the change
> log of the latest patch. Can you resend with a more detailed
> description (like the above).
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -- Steve
> 

Sorry about that, thanks for your patience.