Messages in this thread | | | Subject | [PATCH 0/3] Convert acked !GENERIC_TIME architectures to use the generic timekeeping core. | From | john stultz <> | Date | Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:29:09 -0800 |
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Andrew, All,
Its been two and a half years since the GENERIC_TIME infrastructure landed. It allowed architectures that have free running counters to only have to provide a clocksource driver and leave the rest of the timekeeping management to generic code.
So far out of the 23 architectures we've fully converted 15 of them over to GENERIC_TIME. The remaining 8 have in some cases been able to convert, but not fully. The issue that keeps most architectures from converting is that they do not have free running counters. They instead use the counter on their tick timer to determine their inter-tick time. This counter usually wraps every interrupt, so its not really efficient to use as a clocksource.
This has created some difficulty as the generic timekeeping core has had to deal with both GENERIC_TIME arches as well as !GENERIC_TIME arches, and since it didn't manage 100% of the calculation in the !GENERIC_TIME case, we've been limited in some of the changes we could make.
So since these last remaining architectures are unlikely to be able to fully convert to GENERIC_TIME as it stands, the generic core should try to adopt to their needs so we can bring them into the fold and reduce code duplication.
The solution is to provide a arch callout from the generic timekeeping core: arch_gettimeoffset(). On architectures that do not provide a clocksource, the jiffies clocksource is used, and arch_gettimeoffset is added in to create finer grained inter-tick time.
The patchset I'm submitting does the following: 1) Introduces the arch_gettimeoffset infrastructure to the timekeeping core. 2) Converts two Acked arches (sh, sparc) to use the arch_gettimeoffset() hook.
I still have patches for the 6 other arches that need to be converted, but have not received acks for them yet. Instead of stalling the patchset for all of those arches, I'm submitting these, so overloaded arch maintainers can convert their arches or take my patches on their schedule without blocking arches that are ready to go.
Once all 8 arches are converted, I'll send a final cleanup patch that removes all conditionals and references to GENERIC_TIME.
Credits to Roman for initially suggesting the idea quite awhile back.
thanks -john
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