Booting 2.6.26-rc6 on my 486 DX/4 fails with a "BUG: Int 6"
(invalid opcode) and a kernel halt immediately after the
kernel has been uncompressed. The BUG shows EIP pointing
to an rdtsc instruction in native_read_tsc(), invoked from
native_sched_clock().

(This error occurs so early that not even the serial console
can capture it.)

A bisection showed that this bug first occurs in 2.6.26-rc3-git7,
via commit 9ccc906c

:

>x86: distangle user disabled TSC from unstable
>
>tsc_enabled is set to 0 from the command line switch "notsc" and from
>the mark_tsc_unstable code. Seperate those functionalities and replace
>tsc_enable with tsc_disable. This makes also the native_sched_clock()
>decision when to use TSC understandable.
>
>Preparatory patch to solve the sched_clock() issue on 32 bit.
>
>Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

The core reason for this bug is that native_sched_clock() gets
called before tsc_init().

Before the commit above, tsc_32.c used a "tsc_enabled" variable
which defaulted to 0 == disabled, and which only got enabled late
in tsc_init(). Thus early calls to native_sched_clock() would skip
the TSC and use jiffies instead.

After the commit above, tsc_32.c uses a "tsc_disabled" variable
which defaults to 0, meaning that the TSC is Ok to use. Early calls
to native_sched_clock() now erroneously try to use the TSC on
!cpu_has_tsc processors, leading to invalid opcode exceptions.

My proposed fix is to initialise tsc_disabled to a "soft disabled"
state distinct from the hard disabled state set up by the "notsc"
kernel option. This fixes the native_sched_clock() problem. It also
allows tsc_init() to be simplified: instead of setting tsc_disabled = 1
on every error return, we just set tsc_disabled = 0 once when all
checks have succeeded.

I've verified that this lets my 486 boot again. I've also verified
that a Core2 machine still uses the TSC as clocksource after the patch.

Signed-off-by: Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@it.uu.se>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>