Re: [patch] change futex_wait() to hrtimers

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> What we probably need in the long-term, and not just for high 
> precision wakeups, is we need a way for waiters (either in the kernel 
> or in userspace) to specify a desired precision in their timers.  Is 
> it, "wake me up in a second, exactly", or "wake me up in a second, 
> plus or minus 10ms"?  (or 50ms?  or 100ms?).

such a facility exists already, see round_jiffies() and 
round_jiffies_relative(). There's some short blurb about it at:

  http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges#head-513ceda14f5d8cf5b8a7c81d7e3821543141ecb0

> This becomes especially important if we want the tickless code to 
> really shine as far as power management is concerned. [...]

yes. That's why we also implemented /proc/timer_stat, and this was 
measured and a few higher-frequency fuzzy waiters were converted to use 
round_jiffies(). Some other waiters were fixed in user-space. It's all 
dependent on actual measurements and circumstances.

	Ingo