Re: [patch 00/43] ktimer reworked

From: Kyle Moffett
Date: Thu Dec 01 2005 - 19:41:17 EST


On Dec 01, 2005, at 19:29, Roman Zippel wrote:
Hi,

As for portablility, I believe John Stultz has some nice plugins coming to what timer source you want to use, so if there's a better way to get a time, these should make things easy to add.

These plugins can do no magic, if the hardware timer is slow, the whole thing gets slow.

The point is that you could switch both the timer and timeout implementations to jiffies if you wanted to, at the expense of the accuracy that a lot of people care about.

- resolution: how precise must the timer be? jiffies can't represent time values less than 1ms, but if time is e.g. measured in 10th of a second, jiffies may be enough.

And they would be if that is all you need. But coming from an embedded point of view, that is not nearly enough. I really see HighRes making it into the kernel soon, and any new code in this area really needs to take that into account.

I'm not against HR timer, I have a problem with using them as timer for everything.

This is _exactly_ why there is the timer/timeout distinction. Some things don't care, and as a result use a timer wheel exactly like they always have. For the things that do, however, the new timer API provides it using the fastest hardware interface available.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
I didn't say it would work as a defense, just that they can spin that out for years in court if it came to it.
-- Rob Landley



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