Skip to content
  • David Gibson's avatar
    time: Avoid signed overflow in timekeeping_get_ns() · 35a4933a
    David Gibson authored
    1e75fa8b
    
     "time: Condense timekeeper.xtime into xtime_sec" replaced a call to
    clocksource_cyc2ns() from timekeeping_get_ns() with an open-coded version
    of the same logic to avoid keeping a semi-redundant struct timespec
    in struct timekeeper.
    
    However, the commit also introduced a subtle semantic change - where
    clocksource_cyc2ns() uses purely unsigned math, the new version introduces
    a signed temporary, meaning that if (delta * tk->mult) has a 63-bit
    overflow the following shift will still give a negative result.  The
    choice of 'maxsec' in __clocksource_updatefreq_scale() means this will
    generally happen if there's a ~10 minute pause in examining the
    clocksource.
    
    This can be triggered on a powerpc KVM guest by stopping it from qemu for
    a bit over 10 minutes.  After resuming time has jumped backwards several
    minutes causing numerous problems (jiffies does not advance, msleep()s can
    be extended by minutes..).  It doesn't happen on x86 KVM guests, because
    the guest TSC is effectively frozen while the guest is stopped, which is
    not the case for the powerpc timebase.
    
    Obviously an unsigned (64 bit) overflow will only take twice as long as a
    signed, 63-bit overflow.  I don't know the time code well enough to know
    if that will still cause incorrect calculations, or if a 64-bit overflow
    is avoided elsewhere.
    
    Still, an incorrect forwards clock adjustment will cause less trouble than
    time going backwards.  So, this patch removes the potential for
    intermediate signed overflow.
    
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org  (3.7+)
    Suggested-by: default avatarLaurent Vivier <lvivier@redhat.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarLaurent Vivier <lvivier@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohn Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
    35a4933a