Re: sparc generic time / clockevents

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:51:18 -0800

> Yea. I actually have some in-progress patches from Peter Keilty that
> convert ia64 and sparc64 time_interpolators to clocksources, then
> removes the time_interpolator code.
> 
> The ia64 conversion is more complicated due to the fsyscall asm, but I
> think the sparc64 conversion (below) is pretty straight forward. I've
> only built tested this, so I have no clue if it actually works. 
> 
> Any thoughts?

Hey John, I had to do this already in order to do the dynticks
port to sparc64, but nice to see another attempt :-)

Two things I did on my side:

+	.mask           = 0xffffffffffffffffLL,

I used CLOCKSOURCE_MASK(64) here.

+static cycle_t read_sparc64_cpuclock(void)
+{
+        return (cycle_t)get_cycles();
+}
 ...
+	.read           = read_sparc64_cpuclock,

You can just directly assign tick_ops->get_tick to .read at run-time
to avoid a stack frame and function call/return.

+	.shift          = 16,

These shift selections all seem rather arbitrary.

If it's not an arbitrary selection, it would be nice to have some
comments about how to go about choosing an appropriate shift.
I imagine the selections has to do with the possible range of
the frequencies the clocksource supports, and how much
accuracy you get for certain shift selections given that range.