0n Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 01:26:16PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: 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). Can someone please elaborate on the acronym TSC ? Please no comments about google etc been there done that and it wasn't useful. - aWReceived on Sat Aug 14 2004 - 08:15:56 UTC
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