fastfetch reported 3 seconds of uptime after 15 real ones, `time` claimed
3.12s for a 20-second command, and ping's one-second interval was closer to
six. One cause, not three: `ticks` was advancing at ~14.5 Hz instead of 100.
It was not the timer. virtio-gpu-pci shares IRQ 11 with the e1000 and
registered no interrupt handler at all. PCI INTx is level-triggered, so the
device held the line asserted, the kernel signalled EOI, and it fired again
immediately -- 72,000 interrupts a second, 83% of CPU0, starving the tick.
The e1000's handler read ICR as zero half a million times, correctly
answering "not mine", which is what made it look like a network-free problem.
Reading virtio's ISR byte clears it and drops the line. That is the fix.
irq_dispatch now measures each line's rate against the TSC -- not ticks,
which is the first casualty of a storm -- and names the attached handlers
once above 20000/s. It reproduces the original fault as a single line.
Found along the way, and fixed because they were real:
- lapicinit loaded TICR with xv6's uncalibrated 10000000, whose own comment
admitted it was never measured. calibrate_timers() now measures the LAPIC
and the TSC against the 8254 PIT. (It came back at 999.9 MHz, so this was
not the bug -- but the next machine is not obliged to be 1 GHz.)
- microdelay() was an empty function body. Every microdelay(1000) in the
xHCI reset path and the USB hub power-on sequence returned instantly.
- HZ is a constant in param.h now, not the literal 100 written out at a
dozen ticks-to-seconds conversions. USER_HZ is separate and deliberately
does not follow it: musl answers sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK) with 100 always, so
times() and /proc/stat scale at the syscall boundary the way Linux does.
- TIOCGWINSZ answered a hardcoded 24x80. gfx_cols()/gfx_rows() have known
the real geometry all along; at 1024x768 the console is 128x48, so every
program that lays out a screen was formatting for the wrong one.
- TCFLSH fell through to the catch-all `return 0`, claiming to discard
input without discarding any.
uptime now advances 5.01 seconds per 5 real seconds. schfs-check passes.
Full investigation, including the two wrong hypotheses and the measurement
flaw that protected them, in docs/history/kernel.md section 13.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
67 lines
3.5 KiB
C
67 lines
3.5 KiB
C
#pragma once
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// The timer interrupt rate the kernel is built around. Everything that turns
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// ticks into a duration divides by this. It used to be the literal 100 written
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// out at each site, which made it look like a fact about the hardware; it is
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// not. It is a target, and kernel/arch/x86_64/lapic.c calibrates the LAPIC
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// timer against the PIT to actually hit it.
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#define HZ 100 // timer interrupts per second
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// The tick rate the *user-space ABI* is defined in, which is a different thing
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// from HZ and must not follow it. glibc and musl both answer sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK)
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// with a hardcoded 100, so times() and /proc/stat are read as hundredths of a
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// second no matter what the kernel's internal rate is. Linux calls this USER_HZ
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// and scales at the syscall boundary; so does SchOS, in the two places below.
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#define USER_HZ 100
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// Converting a POSIX timespec/timeval into ticks. These used to appear as the
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// bare literals 10000000 and 10000 at each call site, where they looked like
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// magic numbers rather than what they are: the length of one tick, expressed
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// in the units the caller happens to be using.
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#define NSEC_PER_TICK (1000000000 / HZ)
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#define USEC_PER_TICK (1000000 / HZ)
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#define MSEC_PER_TICK (1000 / HZ)
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#define NPROC 128 // maximum number of processes
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#define KSTACKSIZE 4096 // size of per-process kernel stack (increased for x64)
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#define KSTACK_CANARY 0xDEADC0DEDEADC0DEULL // sentinel at kstack[0], see kstack_check_canary()
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#define NCPU 16 // maximum number of CPUs
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#define NOFILE 128 // open files per process
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#define NFILE 512 // open files per system
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#define NINODE 200 // maximum number of active i-nodes
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#define NDEV 10 // maximum major device number
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#define RAMDISK_DEV 2 // memory-backed block device (kernel/dev/ramdisk.c)
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#define USBDISK_DEV 3 // USB mass storage (kernel/drivers/usb_storage.c)
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// Device the root filesystem is mounted from. Building with RAMROOT=1 defines
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// RAMDISK_ROOT and boots from the SCHFS image linked into the kernel instead
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// of the IDE disk, leaving the physical disk free to be reformatted from a
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// running system. See kernel/dev/ramdisk.c.
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#ifdef RAMDISK_ROOT
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#define ROOTDEV RAMDISK_DEV
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#else
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#define ROOTDEV 1 // device number of file system root disk
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#endif
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#define MAXARG 32 // max exec arguments
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#define MAXPATH 128 // max path
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#define MAXOPBLOCKS 30 // max # of blocks any FS op writes
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#define LOGSIZE (MAXOPBLOCKS*3) // max data blocks in on-disk log
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// Disk block cache, in blocks. 256 * BSIZE = 1 MB.
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//
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// Was MAXOPBLOCKS*3 = 90 blocks, and at the old 1 KB BSIZE that is a 90 KB
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// cache -- smaller than the toybox binary that every single command execs. So
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// nothing was ever still resident on the next command and each one paid the
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// full read again. 1 MB holds toybox with room to spare, which is what makes
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// the *second* command fast rather than just the first.
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//
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// Sized rather than maximised: these are statically allocated in bio.c, so
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// this is memory the system always spends. 1 MB is affordable on a machine
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// with tens of megabytes; 8 MB would not be.
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#define NBUF 256
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#define FSSIZE 150000 // size of file system in blocks
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// Network interfaces the stack will attach. Two is already an ordinary machine
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// -- a laptop with Ethernet plus a virtual adapter -- and each one costs a
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// struct netif, so the limit is about keeping a fixed array honest rather than
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// about memory.
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#define NETIF_MAX 4
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