[RFC] synchronized CPU count registers on SMP machines

[Jun Sun <jsun@mvista.com>]

There are many benefits of having perfectly synchronized CPU
count registers on SMP machines.

I wonder if this is something which have been done before,
and if this is feasible.

Apparently, this scheme won't work if any of the following
conditions are true:

1) clocks on different CPUs don't have the same frequency
2) clocks on different CPUs drift to each other
2) some fancy power saving feature such as frequency scaling

But I think for a foreseeable future most MIPS SMP machines
don't have the above issues (true?).  And it is probably worthwile
to synchronize count registers for them.

I think some pseudo code like the below could get the 
job done:

CPU 0:
        send interrupt to all other CPUs and ask them to sync count
        wait for all other CPUs to gather at rendevous point
        flip a flag
        set count to 0

other CPUs:
        trapped by IPI
        reach the rendevous point (busy spin locking)
        wait for the flip of the flag
        set count to 0

I wonder after the above code how synchronized are the count regsiters.
Are they perfectly synchronized or still differ by a few counts?

Any comments?

Jun