Re: rtc max frequency setting

From: Michael Chang
Date: Sun Aug 05 2007 - 19:40:30 EST


On 8/4/07, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > with the old rtc.ko module, there was a /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq
> > that could be set. With rtc_cmos.ko (or the new rtc infrastructure in
> > general), I am missing this file. Where can I set the max-user-freq now,
> > or is this obsolete now? (mplayer prefers to have user-freq to be >= 1024.)
> >
>
> Qemu wants something like this too. Both of these really want something
> else, which is a high-frequency userspace timer.

For mplayer, you can use -softsleep, but that uses a lot of CPU, and
you're probably already using a great deal of CPU for video decoding,
so it might be less than optimal.

-softsleep
Time frames by repeatedly checking the current time instead of
asking the kernel to wake up MPlayer at the correct time. Useful if
your kernel timing is imprecise and you cannot use the RTC either.
Comes at the price of higher CPU consumption.

And apparently, the build of MPlayer[1] that I have doesn't need rtc,
except on slower machines, according to the man page:

-rtc (RTC only)
Turns on usage of the Linux RTC (realtime clock - /dev/rtc) as
timing mechanism. This wakes up the process every 1/1024 seconds to
check the current time. Useless with modern Linux kernels configured
for desktop use as they already wake up the process with similar
accuracy when using normal timed sleep.

[1] MPlayer dev-SVN-r23777-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team

--
Michael Chang

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. Send me ODT,
RTF, or HTML instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Thank you.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/