[3.16.y-ckt stable] Patch "clocksource/drivers/vt8500: Increase the minimum delta" has been added to the 3.16.y-ckt tree

[Luis Henriques]

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled

    clocksource/drivers/vt8500: Increase the minimum delta

to the linux-3.16.y-queue branch of the 3.16.y-ckt extended stable tree 
which can be found at:

    http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/linux.git/log/?h=linux-3.16.y-queue

This patch is scheduled to be released in version 3.16.7-ckt24.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please 
reply to this email.

For more information about the 3.16.y-ckt tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Luis

---8<------------------------------------------------------------

>From bb0395416bd0cd4f230923ca7e0108b4ca246ab5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Roman Volkov <rvolkov at v1ros.org>
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 16:24:41 +0300
Subject: clocksource/drivers/vt8500: Increase the minimum delta

commit f9eccf24615672896dc13251410c3f2f33a14f95 upstream.

The vt8500 clocksource driver declares itself as capable to handle the
minimum delay of 4 cycles by passing the value into
clockevents_config_and_register(). The vt8500_timer_set_next_event()
requires the passed cycles value to be at least 16. The impact is that
userspace hangs in nanosleep() calls with small delay intervals.

This problem is reproducible in Linux 4.2 starting from:
c6eb3f70d448 ('hrtimer: Get rid of hrtimer softirq')

>From Russell King, more detailed explanation:

"It's a speciality of the StrongARM/PXA hardware. It takes a certain
number of OSCR cycles for the value written to hit the compare registers.
So, if a very small delta is written (eg, the compare register is written
with a value of OSCR + 1), the OSCR will have incremented past this value
before it hits the underlying hardware. The result is, that you end up
waiting a very long time for the OSCR to wrap before the event fires.

So, we introduce a check in set_next_event() to detect this and return
-ETIME if the calculated delta is too small, which causes the generic
clockevents code to retry after adding the min_delta specified in
clockevents_config_and_register() to the current time value.

min_delta must be sufficient that we don't re-trip the -ETIME check - if
we do, we will return -ETIME, forward the next event time, try to set it,
return -ETIME again, and basically lock the system up. So, min_delta
must be larger than the check inside set_next_event(). A factor of two
was chosen to ensure that this situation would never occur.

The PXA code worked on PXA systems for years, and I'd suggest no one
changes this mechanism without access to a wide range of PXA systems,
otherwise they're risking breakage."

Cc: Russell King <linux at arm.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Alexey Charkov <alchark at gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Roman Volkov <rvolkov at v1ros.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano at linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 drivers/clocksource/vt8500_timer.c | 6 ++++--
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/clocksource/vt8500_timer.c b/drivers/clocksource/vt8500_timer.c
index 1098ed3b9b89..dc45ddb36117 100644
--- a/drivers/clocksource/vt8500_timer.c
+++ b/drivers/clocksource/vt8500_timer.c
@@ -50,6 +50,8 @@

 #define msecs_to_loops(t) (loops_per_jiffy / 1000 * HZ * t)

+#define MIN_OSCR_DELTA		16
+
 static void __iomem *regbase;

 static cycle_t vt8500_timer_read(struct clocksource *cs)
@@ -80,7 +82,7 @@ static int vt8500_timer_set_next_event(unsigned long cycles,
 		cpu_relax();
 	writel((unsigned long)alarm, regbase + TIMER_MATCH_VAL);

-	if ((signed)(alarm - clocksource.read(&clocksource)) <= 16)
+	if ((signed)(alarm - clocksource.read(&clocksource)) <= MIN_OSCR_DELTA)
 		return -ETIME;

 	writel(1, regbase + TIMER_IER_VAL);
@@ -160,7 +162,7 @@ static void __init vt8500_timer_init(struct device_node *np)
 		pr_err("%s: setup_irq failed for %s\n", __func__,
 							clockevent.name);
 	clockevents_config_and_register(&clockevent, VT8500_TIMER_HZ,
-					4, 0xf0000000);
+					MIN_OSCR_DELTA * 2, 0xf0000000);
 }

 CLOCKSOURCE_OF_DECLARE(vt8500, "via,vt8500-timer", vt8500_timer_init);