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A new kernel timer APIA new kernel timer APIPosted May 19, 2005 18:42 UTC (Thu) by hamjudo (subscriber, #363)In reply to: A new kernel timer API by brouhaha Parent article: A new kernel timer API But you got your units confused. The smallest power of ten unit that fits is the nanosecond. The smallest power of 2 unit is 2^-32 seconds, which is about 250 picoseconds. To the parent poster, picosecond timers will be usefull, even on chips that are many picoseconds across. Note how well the Network Time Protocol can synchronize clocks to better than millisecond precision, even though the systems themselves are many light milliseconds apart. (assuming appropriate network interconnect.)
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A new kernel timer API Posted May 20, 2005 23:51 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] But you got your units confused. The smallest power of ten unit that fits is the nanosecond. The smallest power of 2 unit is 2^-32 seconds, which is about 250 picoseconds. You're right that brouhaha confused the units (he said 4 seconds worth of picoseconds fit in 32 bits; it's really 4 seconds worth of nanoseconds). But you're introducing a "fits" that nobody's talking about here -- apparently you're intending for 32 bits to count one second. Note that the interface provides multiple granularities/ranges from which to choose. You can specify your interval in milliseconds, microseconds, or nanoseconds. That in no way means you can actually get that kind of precision out of the timer. There's really no reason not to throw in picoseconds, if only to save having to answer the question.
Why not units of 2^-32 seconds? Posted May 23, 2005 16:25 UTC (Mon) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link] That actually sounds like a useful and natural unit to use, and certainly easier for programmers to remember. It would allow the upper 32 bits to be equal to the Unix clock and allow conversion to a floating-point number of seconds without rounding errors.
Is there some good reason why a power of ten should be used? Is it because of rounding errors from times specified in decimal numbers of seconds?
Why not units of 2^-32 seconds? Posted May 24, 2005 2:40 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Natural for whom? The computer?Remember that we're talking about an external interface here -- the question is in what units would a user of the timer facility want to specify a duration? Virtually nobody measures time in binary units; we all think of time in milliseconds, nanoseconds, etc. The Unix time_t type (which I think is what you're referring to as the Unix clock) doesn't actually figure in anywhere here -- this is a value that specifies a duration, not a point in time; and if it ever gets added to a point in time, that time is in the kernel internal format, which is a count of clock ticks.
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