[clug] Any Timers Faster than 10ms?

Alfred alfred at mazuma.net.au
Wed Nov 26 10:43:01 EST 2003


You can try increasing the HZ value of the kernel scheduler to decrease 
timer latency (down to around 1msec reliably with pretty standard PII 
hardware).

Below that look at using the real-time scheduler of the kernel or going 
into kernel space.

- Alfred

Carter, Michael wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm trying to write some software for Linux that has some pretty accurate timing requirements. I know that in userspace you can get timers to wake up processes, but this seems to only be with a granularity of about 10ms, which is apparently how often there is a timer interrupt on IRQ0. However, what I'd really like is to be able to perform a task, sleep for a few hundred microseconds, and then perform another task. Are there any more accurate timers available in the kernel? Perhaps a timer exisits in an ordinary i386 architecture that can offer interrupts at a faster rate? Can I use gettimeofday() in anything other than a busy wait?
> 
> Thanks,
> mick




More information about the linux mailing list