NOHZ: restart tick device from irq_enter()

We did not restart the tick device from irq_enter() to avoid double
reprogramming and extra events in the return immediate to idle case.

But long lasting softirqs can lead to a situation where jiffies become
stale:

idle()
  tick stopped (reprogrammed to next pending timer)
  halt()
   interrupt
     jiffies updated from irq_enter()
     interrupt handler
     softirq function 1 runs 20ms
     softirq function 2 arms a 10ms timer with a stale jiffies value
     jiffies updated from irq_exit()
     timer wheel has now an already expired timer
     (the one added in function 2)
     timer fires and timer softirq runs

This was discovered when debugging a timer problem which happend only
when the ath5k driver is active. The debugging proved that there is a
softirq function running for more than 20ms, which is a bug by itself.

To solve this we restart the tick timer right from irq_enter(), but do
not go through the other functions which are necessary to return from
idle when need_resched() is set.

Reported-by: Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Tested-by: Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c b/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
index cb01cd8f919..f98a1b7b16e 100644
--- a/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
+++ b/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
@@ -384,6 +384,19 @@ int tick_resume_broadcast_oneshot(struct clock_event_device *bc)
 }
 
 /*
+ * Called from irq_enter() when idle was interrupted to reenable the
+ * per cpu device.
+ */
+void tick_check_oneshot_broadcast(int cpu)
+{
+	if (cpu_isset(cpu, tick_broadcast_oneshot_mask)) {
+		struct tick_device *td = &per_cpu(tick_cpu_device, cpu);
+
+		clockevents_set_mode(td->evtdev, CLOCK_EVT_MODE_ONESHOT);
+	}
+}
+
+/*
  * Handle oneshot mode broadcasting
  */
 static void tick_handle_oneshot_broadcast(struct clock_event_device *dev)