• Michal Schmidt's avatar
    ice: avoid the PTP hardware semaphore in gettimex64 path · d29a8134
    Michal Schmidt authored
    The PTP hardware semaphore (PFTSYN_SEM) is used to synchronize
    operations that program the PTP timers. The operations involve issuing
    commands to the sideband queue. The E810 does not have a hardware
    sideband queue, so the admin queue is used. The admin queue is slow.
    I have observed delays in hundreds of milliseconds waiting for
    ice_sq_done.
    
    When phc2sys reads the time from the ice PTP clock and PFTSYN_SEM is
    held by a task performing one of the slow operations, ice_ptp_lock can
    easily time out. phc2sys gets -EBUSY and the kernel prints:
      ice 0000:XX:YY.0: PTP failed to get time
    These messages appear once every few seconds, causing log spam.
    
    The E810 datasheet recommends an algorithm for reading the upper 64 bits
    of the GLTSYN_TIME register. It matches what's implemented in
    ice_ptp_read_src_clk_reg. It is robust against wrap-around, but not
    necessarily against the concurrent setting of the register (with
    GLTSYN_CMD_{INIT,ADJ}_TIME commands). Perhaps that's why
    ice_ptp_gettimex64 also takes PFTSYN_SEM.
    
    The race with time setters can be prevented without relying on the PTP
    hardware semaphore. Using the "ice_adapter" from the previous patch,
    we can have a common spinlock for the PFs that share the clock hardware.
    It will protect the reading and writing to the GLTSYN_TIME register.
    The writing is performed indirectly, by the hardware, as a result of
    the driver writing GLTSYN_CMD_SYNC in ice_ptp_exec_tmr_cmd. I wasn't
    sure if the ice_flush there is enough to make sure GLTSYN_TIME has been
    updated, but it works well in my testing.
    
    My test code can be seen here:
    https://gitlab.com/mschmidt2/linux/-/commits/ice-ptp-host-side-lock-10
    It consists of:
     - kernel threads reading the time in a busy loop and looking at the
       deltas between consecutive values, reporting new maxima.
     - a shell script that sets the time repeatedly;
     - a bpftrace probe to produce a histogram of the measured deltas.
    Without the spinlock ptp_gltsyn_time_lock, it is easy to see tearing.
    Deltas in the [2G, 4G) range appear in the histograms.
    With the spinlock added, there is no tearing and the biggest delta I saw
    was in the range [1M, 2M), that is under 2 ms.
    Reviewed-by: default avatarJacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarPrzemek Kitszel <przemyslaw.kitszel@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Schmidt <mschmidt@redhat.com>
    Tested-by: Pucha Himasekhar Reddy <himasekharx.reddy.pucha@intel.com> (A Contingent worker at Intel)
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTony Nguyen <anthony.l.nguyen@intel.com>
    d29a8134
ice_adapter.h 771 Bytes