a cluster we were seeing a variation of approximately +/- 20MHz in the calibrated values, resulting in NTP failures. [ As far as the SMI source is concerned, this is a periodic SMI that gets disabled after ACPI is enabled by the OS. But the TSC calibration happens before the ACPI is enabled. ] To address this, change pit_expect_msb() so that - the 'tsc' is the TSC in between the two reads that read the MSB change from the PIT (same as before) - the 'delta' is the difference in TSC from *before* the MSB changed to *after* the MSB changed. Now the delta is twice as big as before (it covers four PIT accesses, roughly 4us) and quick_pit_calibrate() will loop a bit longer to get the calibrated value with in the 500ppm precision. As the delta (d1/d2) covers four PIT accesses, actual calibrated result might be closer to 250ppm precision. As the loop now takes longer to stabilize, double MAX_QUICK_PIT_MS to 50. SMI disturbance will showup as much larger delta's and the loop will take longer than usual for the result to be with in the accepted precision. Or will fallback to slow PIT calibration if it takes more than 50msec. Also while we are at this, remove the calibration correction that aims to get the result to the middle of the error bars. We really don't know which direction to correct into, so remove it. Reported-and-tested-by: Suresh Siddha Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Suresh Siddha Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1326843337.5291.4.camel@sbsiddha-mobl2 Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin yÔÖŒš1x