On 02/24/2012 03:40 PM, Philippe Gerum wrote:
> On 02/24/2012 01:28 PM, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
>> On 02/20/2012 05:46 PM, Philippe Gerum wrote:
>>> On 02/19/2012 08:43 PM, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> restarting the ipipe-core is the good opportunity to look a bit at our
>>>> current state and think about what we could improve. On ARM, at least,
>>>> the thing we could improve is the timer subsystem. A long time ago,
>>>> linux has switched to a system allowing to select at run-time which
>>>> timer to use, and we do not really benefit from this, what timer we use
>>>> is selected at compile time, resulting in a massive ifdefery on arm, and
>>>> even on x86, we have to select at compile time whether using the 8254 or
>>>> APIC, whereas we could decide to use whatever linux is using, even say
>>>> HPET, without any compilation option. That is assuming we want to move
>>>> the x86 timer-specific code from xenomai to I-pipe.
>>>>
>>>> The idea to reach this goal would be to add some ipipe specific members
>>>> to the struct clock_event_device, the way we do for the interrupt
>>>> controller:
>>>> - a CLOCK_EVT_FEAT_IPIPE would signal that the clockevent device is
>>>> ipipe capable, meaning that it implements the following callback
>>>> - ipipe_steal would be called when stealing the timer, we could decide
>>>> to call this callback either as part of ipipe_request_timer, or with a
>>>> specific ipipe_steal_timer call, currently we simply set
>>>> __ipipe_mach_timerstolen to 1, but it is pure luck that we never needed
>>>> something more complicated, besides, we may want to start a timer that
>>>> was not started by linux so, we would put its initialization here;
>>>> - ipipe_stolen would record whether the timer is stolen
>>>> - ipipe_min_delta_ticks, ipipe_max_delta_ticks would be used by the
>>>> ipipe_set_next_event callback
>>>> - ipipe_ack would be called to ack the timer interrupt the way we
>>>> currently do it currently on arm with __ipipe_mach_acktimer
>>>> - ipipe_set_next_event would program the next timer shot, the way it is
>>>> currently done in __ipipe_mach_set_dec.
>>>>
>>>> All this is pretty straightforward, but there is still a question: how
>>>> does ipipe_request_timer select a timer. The idea is that on platform
>>>> without PIC muting, it is probably more efficient to use the same timer
>>>> for linux and xenomai. But on platforms with PIC muting, we could want
>>>> to select a different timer for linux and xenomai, but how do we find
>>>> it, what if linux has not selected a timer because it is unusable on
>>>> that platform?
>>>
>>> Checking the clock device mode for CLOCK_EVT_MODE_SHUTDOWN, and falling
>>> back to sharing the active kernel tick device + disabling PIC muting?
>>
>> OK. Another question is: do we want to move x86 timer handling from
>> xenomai to ipipe. If not, we have to find a way to support the two
>> possible configurations. What we could do is using the timer name in
>> ipipe_request_tickdev: if a timer name is supplied, we keep the old
>> implementation, if no timer name is supplied, we use the newho
>> implementation which looks for the best candidate with the
>> CLOCK_EVT_FEAT_IPIPE bit.
>>
>>
> 
> Yes, makes sense. At any rate, handling the real-time timer the way we 
> want for Xenomai directly from the pipeline is the only sane option. We 
> only have to be careful about backward compatibility of the newest core 
> pipelines with 2.6.x, until we stop maintaining this branch in favor of 
> 3.x. We may also move ipipe_request_tckdev() to the compat module fully, 
> removing it from the current API if that makes sense.
> 

For those who would like to follow, the result, a bit different from what
was originally planned is the interface implemented by this file:
http://git.xenomai.org/?p=ipipe-gch.git;a=blob;f=kernel/ipipe/timer.c;h=b9936469652d8fe998157d155fda77df81f0425a;hb=52d36aa86d5c5d463d86d384ad717f26ec96ef8c

And ARM and x86 architectures were re-factored over this interface. As 
an example, the implementation of x86 timers is in this patch:
http://git.xenomai.org/?p=ipipe-gch.git;a=commitdiff;h=52d36aa86d5c5d463d86d384ad717f26ec96ef8c;hp=675a8ed4365eb1f23b098f913caf40e4dc792b80

8254, local APIC and HPET in legacy mode were tested, even selected 
at run-time. Only per-cpu HPET remains to be tested (the hardware 
I have does not support it).

-- 
                                            Gilles.

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