Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 21 Feb 2014 17:56:14 -0000 | From | Thomas Gleixner <> | Subject | [RFC patch 0/5] hrtimers: Add deferrable mode |
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Deferrable timers are beneficial for power saving. They behave like standard timers except that their expiry can be delayed up to the expiry of the next non deferred timer. That prevents them from waking up cpus from deep idle periods.
Right now deferrable timers are only available in the timer wheel and therefor not available to user space applications. Though user space applications want to optimize their timer usage for power consumption as well, so exposing deferred timers via the existing timer APIs is required.
There is no way to bring back timer wheel timers to user space interfaces as they would reintroduce the problems of CLOCK_REALTIME and clock setting again and add quite some mess to the various interfaces.
So the proper solution is to extend the hrtimer functionality with a deferrable mode.
The following series adds the functionality and makes it accessible via the clock_nanosleep, timer_settime and timerfd_settime syscalls.
This series is RFC and largely untested.
Thanks,
tglx
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