On Mon, 2023-12-18 at 08:38 +0100, Peter Hilber wrote: > RFC v3 updates > -------------- > > This series implements a driver for a virtio-rtc device conforming to spec > RFC v3 [1]. It now includes an RTC class driver with alarm, in addition to > the PTP clock driver already present before. > > This patch series depends on the patch series "treewide: Use clocksource id > for get_device_system_crosststamp()" [3]. Pull [4] to get the combined > series on top of mainline. > > Overview > -------- > > This patch series adds the virtio_rtc module, and related bugfixes. The > virtio_rtc module implements a driver compatible with the proposed Virtio > RTC device specification [1]. The Virtio RTC (Real Time Clock) device > provides information about current time. The device can provide different > clocks, e.g. for the UTC or TAI time standards, or for physical time > elapsed since some past epoch. Hm, should we allow UTC? If you tell me the time in UTC, then (sometimes) I still don't actually know what the time is, because some UTC seconds occur twice. UTC only makes sense if you provide the TAI offset, surely? Should the virtio_rtc specification make it mandatory to provide such? Otherwise you're just designing it to allow crappy hypervisors to expose incomplete information. > PTP clock interface > ------------------- > > virtio_rtc exposes clocks as PTP clocks to userspace, similar to ptp_kvm. > If both the Virtio RTC device and this driver have special support for the > current clocksource, time synchronization programs can use > cross-timestamping using ioctl PTP_SYS_OFFSET_PRECISE2 aka > PTP_SYS_OFFSET_PRECISE. Similar to ptp_kvm, system time synchronization > with single-digit ns precision is possible with a quiescent reference clock > (from the Virtio RTC device). This works even when the Virtio device > response is slow compared to ptp_kvm hypercalls. Is PTP the right mechanism for this? As I understand it, PTP is a way to precisely synchronize one clock with another. But in the case of virt guests synchronizing against the host, it isn't really *another* clock. It really is the *same* underlying clock. As the host clock varies with temperature, for example, so does the guest clock. The only difference is an offset and (on x86 perhaps) a mathematical scaling of the frequency. I was looking at this another way, when I came across this virtio-rtc work. My idea was just for the hypervisor to expose its own timekeeping information — the counter/TSC value and TAI time at a given moment, frequency of the counter, and the precision of both that frequency (±PPM) and the TAI timestamp (±µs). By putting that in a host/guest shared data structure with a seqcount for lockless updates, we can update it as time synchronization on the host is refined, and we can even cleanly handle live migration where the guest ends up on a completely different host. It allows for use cases which *really* care (e.g. timestamping financial transactions) to ensure that there is never even a moment of getting *wrong* timestamps if they haven't yet resynced after a migration. Now I'm trying to work out if I should attempt to reconcile with your existing virtio-rtc work, or just decide that virtio-rtc isn't trying to solve the actual problem that we have, and go ahead with something different... ?
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