Re: [RFC] HZ free ntp

[john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>]

On Mon, 2007-01-01 at 19:29 +0100, Roman Zippel wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 02:54, john stultz wrote:
> 
> > And here would be the follow on patch (again *untested*) for
> > CONFIG_NO_HZ slowing the time accumulation down to once per second.
> 
> Changing it to one creates a potential problem with calling second_overflow().
> It should be called every NTP_INTERVAL_FREQ times, but occasionally it's off
> by one (when xtime is close to a full second and the tick length is different
> from 1sec). At a higher frequency that's not much of a problem, but at one it
> means second_overflow() is occasionally called twice a second or skipped for
> a second. Usually the error should be quite small, but sometimes it can be
> significant.
> So in this case the loop in update_wall_time() should rather look like this:
> 
> 	while (offset >= clock->cycle_interval) {
> 		...
> 		second_overflow();
> 		while (clock->xtime_nsec >= (u64)NSEC_PER_SEC << clock->shift) {
> 			clock->xtime_nsec -= (u64)NSEC_PER_SEC << clock->shift;
> 			xtime.tv_sec++;
> 		}
> 		...
> 	}
> 
> (Also note the change from "if" to "while".)

Ah, good catch! Thank you, I'll add that, retest and send it to akpm.

thanks
-john