The local apic timer calibration has two problem cases:
1. The calibration is based on readout of the PIT/HPET timer to detect the
wrap of the periodic tick. It happens that a box gets stuck in the
calibration loop due to a PIT with a broken readout function.
2. CoreDuo boxen show a sporadic PIT runs too slow defect, which results
in a wrong lapic calibration. The PIT goes back to normal operation once
the lapic timer is switched to periodic mode.
Both are existing and unfixed problems in the current upstream kernel and
prevent certain laptops and other systems from booting Linux.
Rework the code to address both problems:
- Make the calibration interrupt driven. This removes the wait_timer_tick
magic hackery from lapic.c and time_hpet.c. The clockevents framework
allows easy substitution of the global tick event handler for the
calibration. This is more accurate than monitoring jiffies. At this point
of the boot process, nothing disturbes the interrupt delivery, so the
results are very accurate.
- Verify the calibration against the PM timer, when available by using the
early access function. When the measured calibration period is outside of
an one percent window, then the lapic timer calibration is adjusted to the
pm timer result.
- Verify the calibration by running the lapic timer with the calibration
handler. Disable lapic timer in case of deviation.
This also removes the "synchronization" of the local apic timer to the global
tick. This synchronization never worked, as there is no way to synchronize
PIT(HPET) and local APIC timer. The synchronization by waiting for the tick
just alignes the local APIC timer for the first events, but later the events
drift away due to the different clocks. Removing the "sync" is just
randomizing the asynchronous behaviour at setup time.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Rohit Seth <rohitseth@google.com> Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> Cc: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com> Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>