On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 11:09 +0530, Nagaprabhanjan Bellari wrote: > I am curious to know why jiffies is initialized with INITIAL_JIFFIES > which is -300 * HZ? It is mentioned in the source that jiffies, when > initialized with this value, will make it overflow in 5 minutes. > > Can somebody tell me how it helps in dealing with jiffy overflow > issues at a later point in time?
A while ago, some bugs where found that occurred when the jiffies counter overflowed (wrapped back to zero). Only people with computers that were up for years ever struck these bugs. By initializing jiffies so the counter overflows after 5 mins, anybody testing a patch that creates a new jiffy-overflow-related bug will see the problem during normal testing - and fix it. Regards, Simon -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecar...@nl.linux.org Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
