linux-imx

jiffies: Fix timeval conversion to jiffies

timeval_to_jiffies tried to round a timeval up to an integral number
of jiffies, but the logic for doing so was incorrect: intervals
corresponding to exactly N jiffies would become N+1. This manifested
itself particularly repeatedly stopping/starting an itimer:

setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &val, NULL);
setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, NULL, &val);

would add a full tick to val, _even if it was exactly representable in
terms of jiffies_ (say, the result of a previous rounding.)  Doing
this repeatedly would cause unbounded growth in val.  So fix the math.

Here's what was wrong with the conversion: we essentially computed
(eliding seconds)

jiffies = usec  * (NSEC_PER_USEC/TICK_NSEC)

by using scaling arithmetic, which took the best approximation of
NSEC_PER_USEC/TICK_NSEC with denominator of 2^USEC_JIFFIE_SC =
x/(2^USEC_JIFFIE_SC), and computed:

jiffies = (usec * x) >> USEC_JIFFIE_SC

and rounded this calculation up in the intermediate form (since we
can't necessarily exactly represent TICK_NSEC in usec.) But the
scaling arithmetic is a (very slight) *over*approximation of the true
value; that is, instead of dividing by (1 usec/ 1 jiffie), we
effectively divided by (1 usec/1 jiffie)-epsilon (rounding
down). This would normally be fine, but we want to round timeouts up,
and we did so by adding 2^USEC_JIFFIE_SC - 1 before the shift; this
would be fine if our division was exact, but dividing this by the
slightly smaller factor was equivalent to adding just _over_ 1 to the
final result (instead of just _under_ 1, as desired.)

In particular, with HZ=1000, we consistently computed that 10000 usec
was 11 jiffies; the same was true for any exact multiple of
TICK_NSEC.

We could possibly still round in the intermediate form, adding
something less than 2^USEC_JIFFIE_SC - 1, but easier still is to
convert usec->nsec, round in nanoseconds, and then convert using
time*spec*_to_jiffies.  This adds one constant multiplication, and is
not observably slower in microbenchmarks on recent x86 hardware.

Tested: the following program:

int main() {
  struct itimerval zero = {{0, 0}, {0, 0}};
  /* Initially set to 10 ms. */
  struct itimerval initial = zero;
  initial.it_interval.tv_usec = 10000;
  setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &initial, NULL);
  /* Save and restore several times. */
  for (size_t i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
    struct itimerval prev;
    setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &zero, &prev);
    /* on old kernels, this goes up by TICK_USEC every iteration */
    printf("previous value: %ld %ld %ld %ld\n",
           prev.it_interval.tv_sec, prev.it_interval.tv_usec,
           prev.it_value.tv_sec, prev.it_value.tv_usec);
    setitimer(ITIMER_PROF, &prev, NULL);
  }
    return 0;
}

Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Cc: Richard Cochran <richardcochran@gmail.com>
Cc: Prarit Bhargava <prarit@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Reported-by: Aaron Jacobs <jacobsa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Hunter <ahh@google.com>
[jstultz: Tweaked to apply to 3.17-rc]
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>