Re: slow nanosleep?

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 2010-09-08 at 15:44 +0200, Joakim Tjernlund wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote on 2010/09/08 15:00:18:
> >
> > On Wed, 2010-09-08 at 14:43 +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > > > However nanosleep with 1 ns and prctl(PR_SET_TIMERSLACK, 1) takes
> > > > about 8 us on x86(Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500  @ 3.16GHz)
> > > > and 20 us on my slower ppc board. Is that system call overhead
> > > > or possibly some error?
> > >
> > > That's overhead I fear. We go way up to enqueue/arm the timer until we
> > > figure out that the timeout already happened.
> >
> > Well, there's also the fact that his ppc board is simply dead slow,
> > using the freq ratio: 3166/266 you'd expect (at a similar ins/clock
> > ratio) the ppc to take 95us.
> >
> > So in fact the pcc taking 20us is actually quite good.
> 
> Actually, it takes 120 us. The 20 us was when I had Thomas
> timeout == 0 fast path patch applied(forgot to remove it).
> Without that patch it takes about 115 us. So it seems it takes
> 115-20=95 us to turn the timer wheel on my ppc.

hrtimers don't have a timer wheel, but it does poke at the hardware,
could be programming timers on that ppc is terribly slow.