RE: [Xen-devel] write_tsc in a PV domain?

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Alan --

> > No, I don't think this is true.  An enterprise app that 
> binds processes
> > to fixed physical processors on a physical machine can make
> > assumptions about the results of rdtsc that aren't valid when
> > the vcpus can skip between pcpus.  Further, like Linux itself,
> 
> They rarely make the right assumptions

I freely admit that there are a high percentage of
apps-that-use-rdtsc that are at risk of being buggy
if moved from a "tsc safe" machine to a "tsc unsafe"
machine.  But, echoing your earlier reply, there are
some that are careful and smart about using rdtsc.

Jeremy's claim is that because some apps-that-use-
rdtsc risk bugginess, Xen can claim rdtsc for its own
use and effectively disallow all uses of rdtsc in any
app by breaking the existing, sometimes-useful semantics
of the instruction.

> > True, but any app that tries to run on a NUMA machine without
> > being aware of the idiosyncracies of a NUMA machine probably
> > has worse problems to deal with than tsc sync.  Further, there
> 
> Disagree - this is true if your NUMA factor is large but quite a few
> machines today are "vaguely NUMA" - the NUMA factor is low 
> enough the app
> doesn't need to care. Anyway you don't need NUMA to see TSC 
> skew between cores.

Yes, but I think we are agreeing here.  My point, poorly
made I admit, is that there are a lot of different machine
topologies and we can't force all applications to
conform to the lowest common denominator.

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