imately reading clock in a forward ocasion. Some adjustments on the host could make this window less likely to happen, but still, it pretty much poses as an intrinsic problem of the mechanism. A while ago, I though about using a shared variable anyway, to hold clock last state, but gave up due to the high contention locking was likely to introduce, possibly rendering the thing useless on big machines. I argue, however, that locking is not necessary. We do a read-and-return sequence in pvclock, and between read and return, the global value can have changed. However, it can only have changed by means of an addition of a positive value. So if we detected that our clock timestamp is less than the current global, we know that we need to return a higher one, even though it is not exactly the one we compared to. OTOH, if we detect we're greater than the current time source, we atomically replace the value with our new readings. This do causes contention on big boxes (but big here means *BIG*), but it seems like a good trade off, since it provide us with a time source guaranteed to be stable wrt time warps. After this patch is applied, I don't see a single warp in time during 5 days of execution, in any of the machines I saw them before. Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa Acked-by: Zachary Amsden CC: Jeremy Fitzhardinge CC: Avi Kivity CC: Marcelo Tosatti CC: Zachary Amsden Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti Ձ