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.

PEPaul E. McKenney committed 5 years ago