Re: device driver for the SGI system clock, mmtimer

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:09:12AM -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Thursday, September 16, 2004 9:03 am, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> > Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > The timer hardware was designed around the multimedia timer specification
> > > by Intel but to my knowledge only SGI has implemented that standard. The
> > > driver was written by Jesse Barnes.
> >
> > As far as I can see, drivers/char/hpet.c talks to the same hardware.
> > HP sx1000 machines (and probably others) also implement the HPET.
> 
> No, it's different hardware.

mmtimer and hpet are the same hardware actually, just a different
specification revision, hpet being the newer one.

> > I think you should look at adding your functionality to hpet.c
> > rather than adding a new driver.
> 
> I think Christoph already looked at that.  And HPET doesn't provide mmap 
> functionality, does it?  I.e. allow a userspace program to dereference the 
> counter register directly?

HPET registers are MMIO so it's in theory possible, while not really
useful if you're using it as your system timer as well.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs, SuSE CR