Re: Timer idea

[George Anzinger <george@mvista.com>]

linux-os (Dick Johnson) wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 evan@coolrunningconcepts.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>I was thinking about benchmarking, profiling, and various other applications
>>that might need frequent access to the current time.  Polling timers or
>>frequent timer signal delivery both seem like there would be a lot of
>>overhead.
>>I was thinking it would be nice if you could just read the time information
>>without making an OS call.
>>
>>I figure the kernel keeps accurate records of current time information and the
>>values of various timers.  I then had the idea that one could have a /dev or
>>maybe a /proc entry that would allow you to mmap() the kernel records (read
>>only) and then you could read this information right from the kernel without
>>any overhead.
> 
> 
> Great invention, read some timer without any overhead! I guess if
> you can figure it out you are up for a Nobel Prize, certainly a new
> breakthrough.
> 
> FYI, even if you put some kernel spinning count in shared-memory,
> it would have overhead. In fact, users might even be able DOS the
> machine by spinning on that count. Putting time in /proc or /dev
> also has great overhead. Have you ever looked at how these
> file-systems work?
> 
> On ix86 machines, basic time comes from chip(s), read from ports.
> That's just another tiny little problem.

Its not just shared memory, but a protected very low overhead extension of the kernel code space 
into the user map.  Mostly what is saved is the system call overhead.
> 
> The time-keeping in Linux certainly has a few problems and they
> don't seem to be getting resolved, just exchanging one set of
> problems for another as the timer code has been rewritten many
> times. It would helpful if somebody did take a fresh new look
> at timekeeping, but reading something from shared memory just
> isn't relevant.

Possibly you would like to review what John is doing and make relevent comments.

-- 
George Anzinger   george@mvista.com
HRT (High-res-timers):  http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/