clocksource: introduce CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW

In talking with Josip Loncaric, and his work on clock synchronization (see
btime.sf.net), he mentioned that for really close synchronization, it is
useful to have access to "hardware time", that is a notion of time that is
not in any way adjusted by the clock slewing done to keep close time sync.

Part of the issue is if we are using the kernel's ntp adjusted
representation of time in order to measure how we should correct time, we
can run into what Paul McKenney aptly described as "Painting a road using
the lines we're painting as the guide".

I had been thinking of a similar problem, and was trying to come up with a
way to give users access to a purely hardware based time representation
that avoided users having to know the underlying frequency and mask values
needed to deal with the wide variety of possible underlying hardware
counters.

My solution is to introduce CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW.  This exposes a
nanosecond based time value, that increments starting at bootup and has no
frequency adjustments made to it what so ever.

The time is accessed from userspace via the posix_clock_gettime() syscall,
passing CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW as the clock_id.

Signed-off-by: John Stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/time.h b/include/linux/time.h
index e15206a7e82e..205f974b9ebf 100644
--- a/include/linux/time.h
+++ b/include/linux/time.h
@@ -117,6 +117,7 @@ extern int do_setitimer(int which, struct itimerval *value,
 extern unsigned int alarm_setitimer(unsigned int seconds);
 extern int do_getitimer(int which, struct itimerval *value);
 extern void getnstimeofday(struct timespec *tv);
+extern void getrawmonotonic(struct timespec *ts);
 extern void getboottime(struct timespec *ts);
 extern void monotonic_to_bootbased(struct timespec *ts);
 
@@ -214,6 +215,7 @@ struct itimerval {
 #define CLOCK_MONOTONIC                 1
 #define CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID        2
 #define CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID         3
+#define CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW             4
 
 /*
  * The IDs of various hardware clocks: