Re: ftape_timestamp and do_gettimeofday?

Claus-Justus Heine (heine@math1.rwth-aachen.de)
05 Dec 1998 00:29:03 +0100


Robert Hamilton <hamilton@users.kdi.com> writes:

> Hi all. Browsing the source I came across what
> I hope is a helpful question: is there any reason
> now why ftape_timestamp() reads the 8254 directly
> instead of calling do_gettimeofday()?
>
> It seems to be used only to compute time differences
> in microsec and for stamping debugging traces, so I
> can't see where there would be any ill effects.
>
> Doing the latter could simplify the routines in
> ftape-calibr.c, put paid to the possible jiffy-
> crossing bugs, and take advantage of the careful
> coding and bugfixes in arch/i386/kernel/time.c,
> so it looks like a win all around to me.
>
> Apologies for not submitting a patch suggestion, but
> without a floppy tape myself, I have no way to test it.

You can't know, but more up-to-date versions of ftape don't use it any
more.

I tried to push ftape-4.02 into recent v2.1 kernel some weeks ago, but
had no time to resent the thing a third of fourth time.

ftape-4.x supports certain kinds of parallel port tape drives, so it
would be nice to have in the v2.2 kernel. It also gets rid of kernel
level software compression which was a bad idea anyway and has
improved write error recovery, compared to all previous versions of
ftape.

I hope to be able to release a new version next week and thereby will
produce a new patch and send it to Linus.

Thanks for taking care

Claus

-- 
  Claus-Justus Heine             
  heine@math1.rwth-aachen.de
  http://www.math1.rwth-aachen.de/~heine/

Ftape - the Linux Floppy Tape Project Home Page : http://www.math1.rwth-aachen.de/~heine/ftape/ CVS Repos. : http://iris3.math1.rwth-aachen.de:8000/cvsweb/ Bug Reports : http://iris3.math1.rwth-aachen.de:8080/gnats/ ftape-bugs@iris3.math1.rwth-aachen.de Mailing-list: linux-tape@vger.rutgers.edu

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