Event timers

[Brandon Gooch]

2010/5/26 Alexander Motin <mav at freebsd.org>:
> Alexander Motin wrote:
>> Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>> on 24/05/2010 18:57 Alexander Motin said the following:
>>>> I have defined several points on that way:
>>>> 1*. clean low-level timer drivers from unrelated stuff,
>>>> 2*. make some common code machine-independent,
>>>> 3. write common driver API for event timers (alike to one we have now
>>>> for time counters) to make adding more drivers possible,
>>>> 4. add support for HPET as event timer in addition to time counter,
>>>> 5. add support for timers in one-shot mode (LAPIC and HPET).
>>> I wonder how much you have progressed for 3,4,5.
>>
>> Not really much yet. Learned existing code and hardware specs, have some
>> thought and ready to proceed.
>
> Here is first approach to 3:
> http://people.freebsd.org/~mav/et.20100526.patch
> , - created common API, heavily refactored attimer, atrtc and lapic
> drivers, written simple and formal common code. Now it is possible to
> use any one or two of these three drivers for either hardclock or
> statclock by just changing weights or disabling them. Tested on i386,
> should work on amd64, probably broken on XEN and pc98 for now.

>From my (minimal) understanding of the timer issues in FreeBSD,
restructuring in this area requires a bold, fearless developer:

Thanks for taking this on Alexander!

Are these proposed patches made available for user testing, or mainly
for developer review purposes?

Is that a dumb question? :)

-Brandon