Re: [PATCH 1/3] dynticks - implement no idle hz for x86

[Srivatsa Vaddagiri]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 09:32:21AM +0100, Russell King wrote:
> When you have a timer which constantly increments from 0 to MAX and
> wraps, and you can set the value to match to cause an interrupt,
> it makes more sense to handle it the way we're doing it (which
> incidentally leads to no loss of precision.)

> Calculating the number of ticks missed, updating the kernel time,
> and updating the timer match will cause problems with these - if
> the timer has already past the number of ticks you originally
> calculated, you may not get another interrupt for a long time.
> 
> So I don't actually think that your proposal will work for these
> (SA11x0 and PXA).

I presume you are referring to code as in omap_32k_timer_interrupt
which calculates lost ticks as well as updates wall-time and 
sets up the next interrupt (BTW doesnt 'now' need to be
refreshed everytime in the loop otherwise will cause the problem
you cite - may not get interrupt for a long time?). Tony,
that may have cause slow bootups for you :)

I am not saying that all the above be done from the callee. In fact
in case of ARM, the same handler can be called from dyn_tick_interrupt.
Having some form of 'dyn_tick_interrupt' makes sense because
it encapsulates functionalities like:

	- If CPU is not sleeping currently, return (which can happen in SMP)
	- Reset the CPU from the bitmap, under the cover of a spinlock
	- Recover wall-time if we are coming out of 'all-cpus-were-asleep'
	  state.  In case of ARM, dyn_tick_timer->handler could be called
	  for this purpose.

 
> This seems to only recover one tick.  What if multiple ticks were lost?

cur_timer->mark_offset() recovers the rest.

-- 


Thanks and Regards,
Srivatsa Vaddagiri,
Linux Technology Center,
IBM Software Labs,
Bangalore, INDIA - 560017
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