On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 02:30:53AM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Jun Sun wrote:
>
> > Isn't it cool to take care of the board-specific with the same interface
> > kernel time system uses? Every MIPS board gets a basic RTC driver for free!
>
> Well, I'm not that convinced. What's wrong with making real support for
> the RTC chip instead?
>
Nothing wrong with full RTC driver support - it is just that when
30+ MIPS boards don't have to add #ifdef's to rtc.c and mc146818rtc.h
and hwclock still works people start appreciate more about the
existence of rtc_set_time().
> >
> > What is the race condition? And what is the performance hit?
>
> You need to read from the RTC, modify minutes and seconds as appropriate
> and write the RTC back. Meanwhile the time as stored in the RTC may
> change. With the 500 ms offset approximation as used by time.c it may be
> unlikely, but that assumption is for the MC146818 and it may not be true
> for incompatible RTC chips. That is the race. The performance hit is
> obvious -- now a read is added to the write.
>
OK, I see the performance hit now.
If you really want, how about the following change:
1) add set_rtc_mmss() function pointer in asm/time.h.
2) set it equal to set_rtc_time in time_init(). Board can override
this decision in board_timer_setup() for better performance.
3) RTC update is changed to call set_rtc_mmss()
How does this sound? It leaves all existing code unchanged, while
gives a way for optimization. The default setting of set_rtc_mmss
to set_rtc_time makes logical sense too, because set_rtc_mmss is really
a "back door" version of set_rtc_time().
Jun
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