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Fixing udelay() on SMP (and non-SMP too)

Stephen Boyd linux-arm-kernel lkml 1 version New

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  1. v1 Latest3 patches 0 repliesNew

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#Subject and filesSizeRepliesApplied
1/3Translate delay.S into (mostly) Carch/arm/include/asm/delay.h arch/arm/kernel/armksyms.c arch/arm/lib/delay.S +1 more+58 -700 replies
2/3Allow machines to override __delay()arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h arch/arm/lib/delay.c+20 -30 replies
3/3Implement a timer based __delay() looparch/arm/include/asm/delay.h arch/arm/lib/delay.c+19 -00 replies

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Cover letter [PATCH 0/3] Fixing udelay() on SMP (and non-SMP too)

These patches are another attempt at fixing the udelay() issue pointed out on arm-lkml[1][2]. A quick recap: some SMP machines can scale their CPU frequencies independent of one another. loops_per_jiffy is calibrated globally and used in __const_udelay(). If one CPU is running faster than what the loops_per_jiffy is calculated (or scaled) for, udelay() will be incorrect and not wait long enough (or too long). A similar problem occurs if the cpu frequency is scaled during a udelay() call.

We could fix this issue a couple ways, wholesale replacement of __udelay() and __const_udelay() (see [2] for that approach), or replacement of __delay() (this series). Option 1 can fail if anybody uses udelay() before memory is mapped and also duplicates most of the code in asm/delay.h. It also needs to hardcode the timer tick frequency, which can sometimes be inaccurate. The benefit is that loops_per_jiffy stays the same and thus BogoMIPS is unchanged. Option 2 can't fail since the __delay() loop is replaced after memory is mapped in, but it suffers from a low BogoMIPS when timers are clocked slowly. It also more accurately calculates the timer tick frequency through the use of calibrate_delay_direct().

-- Reference --
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/977567
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel/78496

Stephen Boyd (3):
[ARM] Translate delay.S into (mostly) C
[ARM] Allow machines to override __delay()
[ARM] Implement a timer based __delay() loop

 arch/arm/include/asm/delay.h |    5 ++-
 arch/arm/kernel/armksyms.c   |    4 --
 arch/arm/lib/delay.S         |   65 ------------------------------
 arch/arm/lib/delay.c         |   90 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 94 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 arch/arm/lib/delay.S
 create mode 100644 arch/arm/lib/delay.c
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