Re: No 100 HZ timer !

Mark Salisbury
2001-04-10T12:41:45Z

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Does not sound very attractive all at all on non virtual machines (I see the point on
> > UML/VM):
> > making system entry/context switch/interrupts slower, making add_timer slower, just to
> > process a few less timer interrupts. That's like robbing the fast paths for a slow path.
>
> Measure the number of clocks executing a timer interrupt. rdtsc is fast. Now
> consider the fact that out of this you get KHz or better scheduling
> resolution required for games and midi. I'd say it looks good. I agree
> the accounting of user/system time needs care to avoid slowing down syscall
> paths
>
> Alan

the system I implemented this in went from 25 Millisecond resolution to 25-60
Nanosecond resolution (depending on the CPU underneath). that is a theoretical
factor of 500,000 to 1,000,000 improvement in resolution for timed events, and
the clock overhead after the change was about the same. (+-10% depending on
underlying CPU)

this is on a system that only had one clock tick per process quantum, as
opposed to the 10 in linux.

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