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Re: MTIME update frequency

Jonathan Behrens <behrensj@...>
 

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 12:27 PM Greg Favor <gfavor@...> wrote:
The current specification says that the MTIME values seen by two HARTs to be not apart by more than 1. It does say the MTIME must always increment in units of 1.  I do not think the specification mandates incrementing by one on each clock tick. Presently it says the tick - the update frequency - can be 100 MHz or 10 MHz or somewhere in between. If the update frequency is 10 MHz then the MTIME increment per clock must be 10. If the update frequency is 100 Mhz then MTIME increment per clock is 1. So is your concern is that an adder that adds 10 to MTIME per clock tick is hard?

I largely agree.  While the clock "tick" is one ulp, an update can increment time by, for example, 10 ticks.  (The same is true in ARM SBSA/BSA/etc.)

I think the argument is that you technically violate the ISA spec if you have two cores and you increment mtime on the first core by +10 then a fraction of a nanosecond later update the second core's mtime by +10. During the tiny duration between the updates on the two cores mtime differs by 10, but the ISA requires mtime to differ by at most 1 at any given instant in time.

Jonathan
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