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  • Colin Percival's avatar
    x86: Speed up clock calibration · c2705cea
    Colin Percival authored
    Prior to this commit, the TSC and local APIC frequencies were calibrated
    at boot time by measuring the clocks before and after a one-second sleep.
    This was simple and effective, but had the disadvantage of *requiring a
    one-second sleep*.
    
    Rather than making two clock measurements (before and after sleeping) we
    now perform many measurements; and rather than simply subtracting the
    starting count from the ending count, we calculate a best-fit regression
    between the target clock and the reference clock (for which the current
    best available timecounter is used). While we do this, we keep track
    of an estimate of the uncertainty in the regression slope (aka. the ratio
    of clock speeds), and stop measuring when we believe the uncertainty is
    less than 1 PPM.
    
    In order to avoid the risk of aliasing resulting from the data-gathering
    loop synchronizing with (a multiple of) the frequency of the reference
    clock, we add some additional spinning depending upon the iteration number.
    
    For numerical stability and simplicity of implementation, we make use of
    floating-point arithmetic for the statistical calculations.
    
    On the author's Dell laptop, this reduces the time spent in calibration
    from 2000 ms to 29 ms; on an EC2 c5.xlarge instance, it is reduced from
    2000 ms to 2.5 ms.
    
    Reviewed by:	bde (previous version), kib
    MFC after:	1 month
    Sponsored by:	https://www.patreon.com/cperciva
    Differential Revision:	https://reviews.freebsd.org/D33802
    c2705cea