This RFC is to try to solve the following problem: We have some applications that are currently running in their own namespace, that still talk to other processes on the machine, using IPC, and expect to run on the same machine. We want to move them into a virtual machine, for the usual benefits of virtualization. However, some of these programs use CLOCK_MONOTONIC and CLOCK_BOOTTIME timestamps, as part of their protocol, when talking to the host. Generally speaking, we have multiple event sources, for example sensors, input devices, display controller vsync, etc and we would like to rely on them in the guest for various scenarios. As a specific example, we are trying to run some wayland clients (in the guest) who talk to the server (in the host), and the server gives input events based on host time. Additionally, there are also vsync events that the clients use for timing their rendering. Another use case we have are timestamps from IIO sensors and cameras. There are applications that need to determine how the timestamps relate to the current time and the only way to get current time is clock_gettime(), which would return a value from a different time domain than the timestamps. In this case, it is not feasible to change these programs, due to the number of the places we would have to change. We spent some time thinking about this, and the best solution we could come up with was the following: Make the guest kernel return the same CLOCK_MONOTONIC and CLOCK_GETTIME timestamps as the host. To do that, I am changing kvmclock to request to the host to copy its timekeeping parameters (mult, base, cycle_last, etc), so that the guest timekeeper can use the same values, so that time can be synchronized between the guest and the host. Any suggestions or feedback would be highly appreciated. Changes in v2: - Move out of kvmclock and into its own clocksource and file. - Remove timekeeping.c #ifdefs. - Fix i386 build. Suleiman Souhlal (2): kvm: Mechanism to copy host timekeeping parameters into guest. x86/kvmclock: Introduce kvm-hostclock clocksource. arch/x86/Kconfig | 9 ++ arch/x86/include/asm/kvm_host.h | 3 + arch/x86/include/asm/kvmclock.h | 12 +++ arch/x86/include/asm/pvclock-abi.h | 27 ++++++ arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h | 1 + arch/x86/kernel/Makefile | 2 + arch/x86/kernel/kvmclock.c | 5 +- arch/x86/kernel/kvmhostclock.c | 130 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 121 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/timekeeper_internal.h | 8 ++ kernel/time/timekeeping.c | 2 + 11 files changed, 319 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 arch/x86/kernel/kvmhostclock.c -- 2.23.0.581.g78d2f28ef7-goog
