riscv: use vDSO common flow to reduce the latency of the time-related functions

Even if RISC-V has supported the vDSO feature, the latency of the functions
for obtaining the system time is still expensive. It is because these
functions still trigger a corresponding system call in the process, which
slows down the response time. If we want to remove the system call to
reduce the latency, the kernel should have the ability to output the system
clock information to userspace. This patch introduces the vDSO common flow
to enable the kernel to achieve the above feature and uses "rdtime"
instruction to obtain the current time in the user space. Under this
condition, the latency cost by the ecall from U-mode to S-mode can be
eliminated. After applying this patch, the latency of gettimeofday()
measured on the HiFive unleashed board can be reduced by %61.

Signed-off-by: Vincent Chen <vincent.chen@sifive.com>
Reviewed-by: Atish Patra <atish.patra@wdc.com>
Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmerdabbelt@google.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/riscv/kernel/time.c b/arch/riscv/kernel/time.c
index 6a53c02e9c73..4d3a1048ad8b 100644
--- a/arch/riscv/kernel/time.c
+++ b/arch/riscv/kernel/time.c
@@ -26,3 +26,12 @@ void __init time_init(void)
 	lpj_fine = riscv_timebase / HZ;
 	timer_probe();
 }
+
+void clocksource_arch_init(struct clocksource *cs)
+{
+#ifdef CONFIG_GENERIC_GETTIMEOFDAY
+	cs->vdso_clock_mode = VDSO_CLOCKMODE_ARCHTIMER;
+#else
+	cs->vdso_clock_mode = VDSO_CLOCKMODE_NONE;
+#endif
+}