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Date:      Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:16:33 +0000
From:      "Caza, Aaron" <Aaron.Caza@ca.weatherford.com>
To:        "freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Hardclock() not so hard on i386 lately.
Message-ID:  <AEDFABC67B24DD4DABD377A367AB98AD03CF41@032-SN1MPN1-005.032d.mgd.msft.net>

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Greetings All,

I've been experiencing a problem with the hardclock() call not exhibiting t=
he same determinism in the FreeBSD 8.1 i386 Stable snapshots since November=
.  In the October snapshot and previous releases, instrumenting the hardclo=
ck() to count ticks and using a kernel thread to print the output, I was se=
eing 1024hz with +/- 1 tick jitter .  Since November, however, I'm seeing a=
 lot more jitter - 1016hz-1024hz.  To verify if the problem was with the ti=
me-keeping or the hardclock(), I modified the hardclock() to raise & lower =
a bit on the parallel port every tick and hooked it up to a frequency count=
er.  With the October release, I'm seeing 1023-1024hz as expected.  With th=
e FreeBSD 8.2 i386 Jan 2011 snapshot I'm seeing 1016-1024hz.

Now, I know between Oct - Nov, the timecounter logic was modified to correc=
tly allow for a 1-tick timecounter as prior to this the best it could do is=
 every other tick; however, I wouldn't think that modifying the timecounter=
 logic would have any bearing on the hard clock.  A diff of kern_clock.c be=
twix the two versions doesn't reveal anything useful.  Being relatively new=
 to FreeBSD, I'm not certain where the next place I should be checking is.

FYI:  This is on an AMD Athlon II X2 235e Processor @ 2.7GHz running the SM=
P kernel.  Setting kern.smp.disabled=3D1 in /boot/loader.conf did not chang=
e the behavior.

Anyone got any useful pointers?

Thanks in advance,
Aaron
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