James E Keenan wrote:
config/gen/platform/generic/hires_timer.c and
config/gen/platform/win32/hires_timer.c were committed to trunk on Sep
06 in r41081 when the 'pluggable_runcore' branch was merged to trunk.
config/gen/platform/darwin/hires_timer.c was added a few hours later in
r41087 in an attempt to cope with Darwin-specific problems. More and
more I think that there are problems with this implementation.
See the following two Trac tickets:
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/985#comment:3 and following
comments. Andy Dougherty cites a number of problems or limitations of
the implementation.
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/989#comment:5, where I report
SIGNAL 10 (SIGBUS) errors on Darwin/PPC subsequent to the introduction
of darwin/hires_timer.c. I thought they had cleared up, but then I
noticed other Smolder reports with the same problem. While these errors
are intermittent, a look at our Smolder reports for Darwin suggest that
they are happening more often than not. I don't have any expertise in
either high-resolution timing or diagnosis of bus errors, so I've done
as much as I can on this ticket.
"Stability!" is supposed to be our theme of the week, especially leading
into Tuesday's release. But this is clearly an area of instability. I'm
hoping that posting to the list because I fear that if these problems
are not treated by Tuesday they will then simply get swept under the rug
in the rush to merge in the next big branch.
Thank you very much.
kid51
I'm reasonably sure the merge is a red herring. I agree that the Configure
system should be used to figure out the optimal high-resolution timer
functions (and it's on my todo list), but it shouldn't have any effect on the
results from any platform. The functions in that file are only used by the
profiling runcore, and that runcore is not automatically tested anywhere yet
(also on my todo list).
Christoph
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