RE: [PATCH v5 3/6] timekeeping: Add clocksource to system_time_snapshot

[Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>]

Jianyong,

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019, Jianyong Wu (Arm Technology China) wrote:

Please fix your mail client not to copy the full headers into the reply.

> > On Wed, 16 Oct 2019, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > > On 15/10/19 22:13, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > That's a completely different beast, really.
> > 
> > The clocksource pointer is handed in by the caller and the core code validates
> > if the clocksource is the same as the current system clocksource and not the
> > other way round.
> > 
> > So there is no need for getting that pointer from the core code because the
> > caller knows already which clocksource needs to be active to make.the whole
> > cross device timestamp correlation work. And in that case it's the callers
> > responsibility to ensure that the pointer is valid which is the case for the
> > current use cases.
> > 
> I thinks there is something misunderstanding of my patch. See patch 4/6,
> the reason why I add clocksource is that I want to check if the current
> clocksouce is arm_arch_counter in virt/kvm/arm/psci.c and nothing to do
> with get_device_system_crosststamp.

There is no misunderstanding at all. Your patch is broken in several ways
as I explained in detail.

> So I really need a mechanism to do that check.
> 
> Thanks
> Jianyong

So just by chance I scrolled further down and found more replies from
you. Please trim the reply properly and add your 'Thanks Jianyong' to the
end of the mail.
 
> > From your other reply:
> > 
> > > Why add a global id?  ARM can add it to archdata similar to how x86
> > > has vclock_mode.  But I still think the right thing to do is to
> > > include the full system_counterval_t in the result of
> > > ktime_get_snapshot.  (More in a second, feel free to reply to the other
> > email only).
> > 
> > No, the clocksource pointer is not going to be exposed as there is no
> > guarantee that it will be still around after the call returns.
> > 
> > It's not even guaranteed to be correct when the store happens in Wu's patch
> > simply because the store is done outside of the seqcount protected region.
> 
> Yeah, all of the elements in system_time_snapshot should be captured in
> consistency. So I think the consistency will be guaranteed if the store
> ops added in the seqcount region.

Again. While it is consistent in terms of storage, it's still wrong to
expose a pointer to something which has no life time guarantee. Even if
your use case is just to compare the pointer it's a bad idea to do that
especially without any comment about the pointer validity at all.

Thanks,

	tglx