Re: Is the TSC timecounter safe on SMP system?

John Baldwin writes:
 > On Friday 13 August 2004 12:49 pm, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
 > > I have a system where the TSC timecounter is quite a bit more accurate
 > > (or perhaps its just much cheaper) than the ACPI timecounter.  This is a
 > > single CPU, HTT system running an SMP kernel.
 > >
 > > A simple program which calls gettimeofday() in a tight loop, looking
 > > for the microseconds to change sees ~998,000 microsecond updates/sec
 > > with kern.timecounter.hardware=TSC, and 28,500 updates/sec with ACPI-safe.
 > >
 > > 1) Is it safe to switch to TSC?
 > >
 > > 2) If yes, would it be safe to switch to TSC if this was a real
 > >    SMP system with multiple physical cpus?
 > 
 > Probably not.  The problem is that the TSC is not necessarily in sync between 
 > the CPUs so time would "jump around" as you migrated between CPUs.  If you 
 > can get the TSC's synchronized between the CPUs and keep them that way then 
 > you can use the TSC (Linux does this FWIW).
 > 

But on a single CPU HTT machine, does each HTT core reads the same TSC?


Drew