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, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/riscv/include/asm/vdso.h b/arch/riscv/include/asm/vdso.h
index 7a7fce63c474..8454f746bbfd 100644
--- a/arch/riscv/include/asm/vdso.h
+++ b/arch/riscv/include/asm/vdso.h
@@ -10,8 +10,10 @@
 
 #include <linux/types.h>
 
+#ifndef GENERIC_TIME_VSYSCALL
 struct vdso_data {
 };
+#endif
 
 /*
  * The VDSO symbols are mapped into Linux so we can just use regular symbol