Re: [linux-pm] [2/6] 2.6.21-rc2: known regressions

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 16:33 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>
>   
>> What you say sounds good, assuming that the cost of a sleep is less than 
>> the cost of the busy wait. But this may be hardware, the waits may be 
>> very small and frequent, and if it's hitting a small hardware window 
>> like retrace, delays in response will cause the time period to be missed 
>> completely. This probably less critical with very smart cards, many of 
>> us don't run them.
>>     
>
> Actually, various strategies involving short busy waiting, or looking at
> DMA address registers before sleeping were commonplace.  But a
> syscall/sleep/wakeup is/was pretty fast.  If you have an operation
> blitting the screen (e.g. scrolling), it takes a bit of time for the GPU
> to execute the command.  I see this right now on OLPC, where a wonderful
> music application needs to scroll (most of) the screen left),
> periodically, and we're losing samples sometimes at those operation.
>   
None of that conflicts with what I said, but what works on an LCD may 
not be appropriate for a CRT. With even moderate 1024x768@70 timing the 
horizontal retrace happens ~50k/sec, and that's not an appropriate 
syscall rate. I'm just pointing out that some things a video interface 
does with simple hardware involve lots of very small windows. Don't read 
that as "don't do it," just "be careful HOW you do it."
> Remember also, that being nice to everyone else by sleeping, there are
> more cycles to go around, and the scheduler can nicely boost the X
> server's priority as it will for "interactive" processes that are being
> cooperative.
I'm going to cautiously guess that the problem might be not "how much" 
but "how soon." That is, latency might be more important than giving the 
server a lot of CPU.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979