On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 08:40 +0100, David Laight wrote:

I keep telling Eric that the code below is incorrect
modulo arithimetic...

His previous versions were wrong yes. This one should be limping along
afaik. But I tend to agree, testing delta is the way to go.

Eric idea was to not test the sign bit to allow for bigger increments of
the counter, since the rollback is limited to 255... But I agree it's
non obvious.

I've put the patch in for now, we can always followup with something
better.

Cheers,
Ben.

quoted

+static u64 check_and_compute_delta(u64 prev, u64 val)
+{
+	u64 delta = (val - prev) & 0xfffffffful;
+
+	/*
+	 * POWER7 can roll back counter values, if the new value is

smaller

quoted

+	 * than the previous value it will cause the delta and the

counter to

quoted

+	 * have bogus values unless we rolled a counter over.  If a

coutner is

quoted

+	 * rolled back, it will be smaller, but within 256, which is the

maximum

quoted

+	 * number of events to rollback at once.  If we dectect a

rollback

quoted

+	 * return 0.  This can lead to a small lack of precision in the
+	 * counters.
+	 */
+	if (prev > val && (prev - val) < 256)
+		delta = 0;
+
+	return delta;

The code should detect rollback by looking at the value of 'delta'
otherwise there are horrid end effects near 2^32-1.

For instance:
	u32 delta = val - prev;
	return delta & 0x80000000 ? 0 : delta;


   David




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