Short sleep precision

Short sleep precision

[Jan Engelhardt]

Hello,


I have found that FreeBSD has a very good precision of small sleeps --
what's holding Linux back from doing the same? Using the code snippet below, 
FBSD yields between 2 and 80 us on the average while Linux is at 
"constantly" ~100 (with HZ=1000) and ~1000 (HZ=100).


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

#include <sys/time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#define MICROSECOND 1000000
static unsigned long calc_ovcorr(unsigned long ad, int rd) {
    struct timespec s = {.tv_sec = 0, .tv_nsec = ad};
    struct timeval start, stop;
    unsigned long av = 0;
    int count = rd;

    while(count--) {
        gettimeofday(&start, NULL);
        nanosleep(&s, NULL);
        gettimeofday(&stop, NULL);
        av += MICROSECOND * (stop.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) +
         stop.tv_usec - start.tv_usec;
    }

    av /= rd;
    fprintf(stderr, " %lu us\n", av);
    return av;
}

int main(void) {
    calc_ovcorr(0, 100);
    return 0;
}

//eof

Re: Short sleep precision

[Jesper Juhl]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> 
> I have found that FreeBSD has a very good precision of small sleeps --
> what's holding Linux back from doing the same? Using the code snippet below, 
> FBSD yields between 2 and 80 us on the average while Linux is at 
> "constantly" ~100 (with HZ=1000) and ~1000 (HZ=100).
> 
Running your program here I see even worse values than that on 2.6.11-mm4 
and it's also interresting to see that for a lot of continuous runs the 
values reported drop steadily and eventually settle around ~1100, but if I 
insert a  sleep 1  between runs, then I see a steady ~1000 reported.
This is all with HZ = 1000


juhl@dragon:~/download/kernel/linux-2.6.11-mm4$ for i in `seq 1 40`; do ./a.out ; done
 1414 us
 1434 us
 1423 us
 1424 us
 1433 us
 1423 us
 1420 us
 1439 us
 1434 us
 1433 us
 1463 us
 1462 us
 1450 us
 1431 us
 1403 us
 1391 us
 1376 us
 1364 us
 1362 us
 1344 us
 1353 us
 1353 us
 1334 us
 1323 us
 1313 us
 1314 us
 1293 us
 1293 us
 1273 us
 1274 us
 1271 us
 1264 us
 1264 us
 1244 us
 1244 us
 1214 us
 1214 us
 1214 us
 1183 us
 1183 us

juhl@dragon:~/download/kernel/linux-2.6.11-mm4$ for i in `seq 1 10`; do (./a.out ; sleep 1) ; done
 1113 us
 997 us
 997 us
 998 us
 997 us
 997 us
 996 us
 997 us
 996 us
 996 us

Re: Short sleep precision

[Jan Engelhardt]

>Running your program here I see even worse values than that on 2.6.11-mm4 
>and it's also interresting to see that for a lot of continuous runs the 
>values reported drop steadily and eventually settle around ~1100, but if I 
>insert a  sleep 1  between runs, then I see a steady ~1000 reported.
>This is all with HZ = 1000

That may be related to the new mix of USER_HZ. I can't really tell, 
just observed that there is such.

>Linux nanosleep() used to have a busywait loop for sleeps less than two
>milliseconds.  2.4.x still does.

Yes, I know. Linus threw it out during 2.5 because it was deemed to buggy.
That did not affect me, because that busywaiting is only possible in 
!SCHED_OTHER, which I cannot use, because tiny delays are needed in a 
user-runnable userspace app, and I don't want it suid and stuff.

(I've developed an "overhead correction" for accurate(*) realtime replay of 
logfiles. (*) with respect to the total runtime. Works well.)

>You can spin on the gettimeofday() result in userspace.

How can I use it? / What does it help me? I just have the gettimeofday() in 
the example script to measure the total time of nanosleep(). Sometimes, 
nanosleep completes in the same tick, sometimes (95%), another task is 
scheduled before returning. I am calling nanosleep repetedly to find out the 
_average_ time for a 0us-nanosleep(), usually 100/1000 us.



Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: Short sleep precision

[Chris Friesen]

Jan Engelhardt wrote:

>>You can spin on the gettimeofday() result in userspace.
> 
> 
> How can I use it?

Something like:

gettimeofday(&curtime,0);
add_usecs(&curtime,  time_to_sleep);
do {
	gettimeofday(&curtime,0);
} while (time_before(&curtime, &expiry);


Of course, if someone changes the system time on you you're screwed....

Chris

RE: Short sleep precision

[Robert White]

Actually look at linux/Documentation/rtc.txt for a "reasonably portable" way to get
very small quanta with fair regularity.

Since the original poster wanted it to be user accessible, and since it is a
contended/exclusive device, he may want to make a broker daemon or something.

Since nanosleep doesn't constrain the max time of the sleep, you get the same
performance by setting the timer the "a good way" and then spinning on it from user
space, or blocking or whatever.  Confabulating the right thing to do for
non-power-of-2 times is pretty trivial too.

Not perfect, but trying to be all things to all people, and all that... 8-)


Rob White,
Casabyte, Inc.

Re: Short sleep precision

[Jan Engelhardt]

Hello,

>> > You can spin on the gettimeofday() result in userspace.
>> How can I use it?
> Something like:
>
> gettimeofday(&curtime,0);
> add_usecs(&curtime,  time_to_sleep);
> do {
> 	gettimeofday(&curtime,0);
> } while (time_before(&curtime, &expiry);

That's looks like a lot of CPU consumption, which I would like to avoid 
because time_to_sleep is nondeterministic in my case.


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: Short sleep precision

[Jan Engelhardt]

>> That's looks like a lot of CPU consumption, which I would like to avoid
>> because time_to_sleep is nondeterministic in my case.
>
> If you want to delay for less than a tick, you pretty much need to busy-wait.
> There's no way to set a timer for intervals less than a tick in the regular
> kernel.[...]

I bet I stay with my current approach -- count the time we actually slept, and 
sleep less the next time. Thanks for your time and thoughts!


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: Short sleep precision

[Andrew Morton]

Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de> wrote:
>
> I have found that FreeBSD has a very good precision of small sleeps --

Linux nanosleep() used to have a busywait loop for sleeps less than two
milliseconds.  2.4.x still does.

We thought it was stupid and took it out.

>  what's holding Linux back from doing the same? Using the code snippet below, 
>  FBSD yields between 2 and 80 us on the average while Linux is at 
>  "constantly" ~100 (with HZ=1000) and ~1000 (HZ=100).
> 

You can spin on the gettimeofday() result in userspace.