GitLab

We already catch most of the TSC problems by sanity checks, but there
is a subtle bug which has been in the code forever. This can cause
time jumps in the range of hours.

This was reported in:
     http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/23/96
and
     http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/3/31/23

I was able to reproduce the problem with a gettimeofday loop test on a
dual core and a quad core machine which both have sychronized
TSCs. The TSCs seems not to be perfectly in sync though, but the
kernel is not able to detect the slight delta in the sync check. Still
there exists an extremly small window where this delta can be observed
with a real big time jump. So far I was only able to reproduce this
with the vsyscall gettimeofday implementation, but in theory this
might be observable with the syscall based version as well.

CPU 0 updates the clock source variables under xtime/vyscall lock and
CPU1, where the TSC is slighty behind CPU0, is reading the time right
after the seqlock was unlocked...