Hi all,

I'm able to reproduce the following on two different platforms now, so
I assume it's a IRQ_PIPELINE generic issue:

Platform A):
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1518 @ 2.20GHz
1 Socket, 4 Cores, 1 thread per core

Platform B):
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz
2 Sockets, 6 cores per socket, 2 threads per core
(2 NUMA nodes)


Platform A) reports the TSC being unstable during the boot phase,
platform B) reports the TSC as unstable when running stress tests:

Taken from a B) based system:

[57615.671114] clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU17: Marking clocksource 
'tsc' as unstable because the skew is too large:
[57615.738269] clocksource:                       'hpet' wd_now: 12f85ed0 
wd_last: 2c5eab7b mask: ffffffff
[57615.794489] clocksource:                       'tsc' cs_now: 68e299c3708c 
cs_last: 6864c6ea3970 mask: ffffffffffffffff
[57615.858552] tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog
[57615.858582] TSC found unstable after boot, most likely due to broken BIOS. 
Use 'tsc=unstable'.
[57615.910138] sched_clock: Marking unstable (57615104375773, 
749891156)<-(57616072553488, -213973554)
[57615.905983] clocksource: Checking clocksource tsc synchronization from CPU 
15.
[57615.949626] clocksource: Override clocksource tsc is unstable and not HRT 
compatible - cannot switch while in HRT/NOHZ mode
[57616.016343] clocksource: Switched to clocksource hpet

The clocksource watchdog is migrated between CPUs to make sure the TSC
is synchronized between cores. For me it looks like a late delivery of
the watchdog timer.

Available workaround(s):
- Add "tsc=reliable" to the kernel cmdline args
- At least for A) based systems it helped to apply the following diff to the 
kernel
  configuration. I do not consider that as "solution" for now.

-CONFIG_HZ_100=y
+CONFIG_HZ_1000=y


As soon as I disable CONFIG_IRQ_PIPELINE the problem is gone.

I already tried testing with CONFIG_DEBUG_IRQ_PIPELINE enabled, but
that didn't help so far.

Any advise how to debug that?

Best regards,
Florian

-- 
Siemens AG, T RDA IOT
Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux

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