Getting TSC rate in x86 kernel

Question

I have an embedded Linux system running on an Atom, which is a new enough CPU to have an invariant TSC (time stamp counter), whose frequency the kernel measures on startup.

Answer 1

I had a brief look and there doesn't seem to be a built-in way to directly get this information from the kernel.

However, the symbol tsc_khz (which I'm guessing is what you want) is exported by the kernel. You could write a small kernel module that exposes a sysfs interface and use that to read out the value of tsc_khz from userspace.

If writing a kernel module is not an option, it may be possible to use some Dark Magic™ to read out the value directly from the kernel memory space. Parse the kernel binary or System.map file to find the location of the tsc_khz symbol and read it from /dev/{k}mem. This is, of course, only possible provided that the kernel is configured with the appropriate options.

Lastly, from reading the kernel source comments, it looks like there's a possibility that the TSC may be unstable on some platforms. I don't know much about the inner workings of the x86 arch but this may be something you want to take into consideration.