Re: VIA 686 timer bugfix incomplete

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 10:17:51PM +0100, Jonas Diemer wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Nov 2001 21:08:40 +0100
> Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz> wrote:
> 
> > There is a little problem with RTC, though:
> > 
> > While you can set it up to generate interrupts at say 1024 Hz, you can't
> > read any value of how much time passed since last interrupt. You can do
> > this on the PIT (i8253), and this is the part that is buggy.
> > 
> > TSC is perfect, precise and accurate, but not reliable in long term.
> > Some CPUs do thermal throttling, notebooks play with CPU speed, etc,
> > etc. And it's not synchronized to any interrupt source.
> > 
> > Ugly, ugly, ugly is the PC architecture.
> > 
> 
> can't you just read the battery buffered clock? how are other OSes such as
> Window$ doing the timing?

You can. But you only get 0.5 second resolution, which obviously isn't
good enough for microsecond timing.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs