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SubjectRe: Important patch to fix select!
Steve Underwood wrote:
> The whole point is you can't make select _extremely_ accurate, unless the
> machine is idle. Any machine activity has the potential to make screen
> updates stutter. Stuttering is _very_ bad for the perceived visual quality
> of motion. Most visual flow things look far better if you miss the odd
> frame update, but get the ones that do occur to happen exactly on time.
> That way a short term machine overload causes just a hiccup in the flow.
> Select will always cause visually unpleasant jitter, even if its timing is
> much better than today's.

Yes, indeed, a good animation (game or whatever) has to take the delay
into account that happend between the last and the current frame.

With the current situation in various OSes, a game or other low-frequent
real time applications have to take a mix of system calls and
busy-waiting to get good timing. For visual effects, the resolution of
the OS timers generally is good enough (50 HZ are sufficient), but for
sound, it's not. I've written an accurate MIDI player (using
busy-waiting), and although the Linux kernel allows MIDI events to
schedule at 100 HZ, you hear the difference for some special cases (like
pitching a tone in a slope). Certainly you also hear a busy machine, but
it isn't that awful on Linux, since the MIDI player gets a quite high
dynamic priority.

What I want from an OS (if it can't give me a precise timer), is at
least allow a timer+busy waiting strategy.

The first timer that comes in mind is the setitimer timer - just do what
the OS has to do in user space. However, timer signals are a bad idea
under Unix, since with such a timer, you get EAGAIN all over the place.

So next idea is select(). After all, you might be expecting some data
anyway (e.g. on the pipe to X). Select's timeout has two disadvantageous
properties: first, it's a delta. All my timer codes use absolute timers,
which allows for predictable repetition, and a lot of other fine
properties (especially that the timeout doesn't change with delay during
process of a timer wait function). But worse, only select's man page
does guarantee that it will return in time.

What's my workaround?

First, I measure the actual worst-case delay of select(), that is I call
select with a 20 ms timeout (if the machine is idle, that'll return just
after a tick occured). Then I call gettimeofday(), select with 1 ms
timeout, and gettimeofday() again. Until recently, the time difference
was almost 20 ms. The improvement the patch in this thread was to "fix"
about gives me almost 10 ms (the current experimental kernel select is
conformant with the somewhat contradictionary POSIX description).

What I really want is less than or up to 1 ms - first, because that's
what's literally in the select manpage, and second, because that allows
me to busy-wait only when busy-waiting *really is necessary*, and no
more than that. That's what my patch gives me (in message
<Pine.LNX.4.10.9907101418200.6704-200000@granny.paysan.nom>, Subject:
[Patch] Re: usleep granularity).

And finally a rant to all CPU designers:

Add a timer source to your CPU! It needs one cyclic counter (one tick
per clock, like the TSC, could also be one tick per bus clock; I'm
completely agnostig about increment or decrement, but the wrapover must
be more than 10 ms), and one compare register. Issue an interrupt when
the compare register becomes equal to the timer. And add a "reset all
timers" pin/command and a master clock signal to your SMP bus
specification. Timers must be in sync!

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/

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