On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 03:41:32PM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Jun Sun wrote:
>
> > Solution
> > --------
> >
> > All the boards that I am really concerned right now have cpu count/compare
> > registers. I believe this will even more so in the future.
> >
> > Therefore I like to propose a separate time support for systems that use
> > cpu timer as their system timer.
> >
> > As you can see from the patch, the new code is much simpler.
>
> It makes it separate again -- more maintenance burden and a bigger
> opportunity to have functional divergence, sigh...
>
Pretty much true for lots of improvement we made in the past a couple of
years .... :)
> Additionally I don't think using the CP0 Count & Compare registers for
> the system timer is the way to go. It's rather a way to escape when
> there's no other possibility. A lot of systems have a reliable external
> timer interrupt source and using it actually would free the CP0 registers
> for other uses, like profiling or a programmable interval timer.
>
I was rather neutral on this point until I started to add HRT/VST support to
MIPS. When adding such features you really just want one common timer code.
And the best choice for MIPS is cpu timer.
BTW, I plan to submit MIPS/HRT support based on the cpu-timer patch. Hopefully
this will catch more attention to the cpu timer patch....
Jun
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