Hi!
> > >>This patch, in conjunction with the "core" high-res-timers
> > >>patch implements high resolution timers on the i386
> > >>platforms.
> > >
> > >
> > > I really don't get the notion of partial ticks, and quite frankly, this
> > > isn't going into my tree until some major distribution kicks me in the
> > > head and explains to me why the hell we have partial ticks instead of just
> > > making the ticks shorter.
>
> Not speaking for a major distro, just for me writing HPET (high
> performance event timer ...) support for x86-64 (and it happens to exist
> on ia64 as well, and possibly might be in new Intel P4 chipsets, too).
>
> It's a very nice piece of hardware that allows very fine granularity
> aperiodic interrupts (in each interrupt you set when the next one will
> happen), without much overhead.
I believe the problem is like this: assume you have three timers,
10msec polling of mouse, 30msec keyboard autorepeat and 50msec cursor
blinking. With current approach, you get
10msec userland runs
<enter kernel>
<process mouse>
<process keyboard>
<process cursor>
<exit kernel>
With hires timers, you get:
3msec userland runs
<enter kernel>
<process mouse>
<exit kernel>
2msec userland runs
<enter kernel>
<process keyboard>
<exit kernel>
...
which is not so efficient. I guess rounding could be implemented to
preserve this "do-all-together" ability?
Pavel
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 15 2002 - 22:00:54 EST