Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v3] net: mvpp2: tai: warn once if we fail to update our timestamp

From: "Russell King (Oracle)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2025 16:26:04 +0000

On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 09:14:02PM -0800, Richard Cochran wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 04:34:06PM +0000, Russell King wrote:
> > The hardware timestamps for packets contain a truncated seconds field,
> > only containing two bits of seconds. In order to provide the full
> > number of seconds, we need to keep track of the full hardware clock by
> > reading it every two seconds.
> > 
> > However, if we fail to read the clock, we silently ignore the error.
> > Print a warning indicating that the PP2 TAI clock timestamps have
> > become unreliable.
> 
> Rather than printing a warning that user space might not read, why not
> set a flag and stop delivering time stamps until the upper bits are
> available once again?

If we fail to read the clock, that will be because the hardware didn't
respond to our request to read it, which means the hardware broke in
some way. We could make mvpp22_tai_tstamp() fail and not provide
timestamps until we have successfully read the HW clock, but we would
still want to print a warning to explain why HW timestamps vanish.

However, if this happens, then it also means that the gettimex64 PTP
clock ioctl will also fail, so I would suggest that the user would
find out about it anyway.

So, I don't think the extra complexity is worth doing.

This is to catch a spurious failure that may only affects an occasoinal
attempt to read the HW PTP time. Currently, we would never know,
because the kernel is currently completely silent if that were to ever
happen.

-- 
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