Allow the active timer (providing udelay() and currticks()) to be
selected at runtime based on probing during the INIT_EARLY stage of
initialisation.
TICKS_PER_SEC is now a fixed compile-time constant for all builds, and
is independent of the underlying clock tick rate. We choose the value
1024 to allow multiplications and divisions on seconds to be converted
to bit shifts.
TICKS_PER_MS is defined as 1, allowing multiplications and divisions
on milliseconds to be omitted entirely. The 2% inaccuracy in this
definition is negligible when using the standard BIOS timer (running
at around 18.2Hz).
TIMER_RDTSC now checks for a constant TSC before claiming to be a
usable timer. (This timer can be tested in KVM via the command-line
option "-cpu host,+invtsc".)
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
iPXE uses currticks() (along with the MAC address(es) of any network
devices) to seed the (non-cryptographic) random number generator. The
current implementation of linux_currticks() ensures that the first
call to currticks() will always return zero; this results in identical
random number sequences on each run of iPXE on a given machine. This
can cause odd-looking behaviour due to e.g. the reuse of local TCP
port numbers.
Fix by effectively rounding down the start time recorded by
linux_currticks() to the nearest whole second; this makes it unlikely
that consecutive runs of iPXE will use the exact same RNG sequence.
(Note that none of this affects the cryptographic RNG, which uses
/dev/random as a source of entropy.)
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
Michael Brown