On Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:52:34 AM [email protected] wrote: > Hello, > > I am trying to figure out how timers work for the amd64 platform on freebsd > 10. > > How the kernel manage the timers? is it using TSC?
The kern.timecounter sysctl tree shows the available timercounters (and information about each one) as well as which one is currently being used. Note that timecounters are used to compute the uptime and time-of-day for get*time and *time as well as gettimeofday() and clock_gettime() in userland. There is another timer interface used to manage interval timers. This uses timer interrupts to terminate sleeps, and things like setitimer(), alarm(), etc. (also the timeouts for select(2) and poll(2), etc.). These can be examined via the kern.eventtimer sysctl tree. In some cases the same hardware can be used for both purposes, but not always. On x86 it is common to use the TSC for the timecounter and the local APIC timer for the event timer. > I see lot of functions using getnanotime and friend but I don't get how they > work. > They just iterate over time and read a volatile value. Where/how is that > value kept updated? Every so often an event timer interrupt triggers the tc_windup() function in kern_tc.c. That function updates the timehands structure used by getnanotime() and friends. -- John Baldwin _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-amd64 To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
