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Annotation of wikisrc/projects/project/tickless.mdwn, revision 1.6

1.1       riastrad    1: [[!template id=project
                      2: 
1.6     ! martin      3: title="Tickless NetBSD with high-resolution timers (350h)"
1.1       riastrad    4: 
                      5: contact="""
                      6: [tech-kern](mailto:tech-kern@NetBSD.org)
                      7: """
                      8: 
                      9: mentors="""
                     10: [Taylor R Campbell](mailto:riastradh@NetBSD.org)
                     11: """
                     12: 
                     13: category="kernel"
                     14: difficulty="hard"
1.6     ! martin     15: duration="350h"
1.1       riastrad   16: 
                     17: description="""
                     18: NetBSD configures a timer device to deliver a periodic timer interrupt,
                     19:  usually every 10 ms, in order to count time, wake threads that are
                     20:  sleeping, etc.
                     21: This made sense when timer devices were expensive to program and CPUs
                     22:  ran at MHz.
                     23: But today, CPUs run at GHz; timers on modern x86, arm, mips,
1.2       riastrad   24:  etc. hardware are cheap to reprogram; programs expect greater than
1.1       riastrad   25:  10 ms resolution for sleep times; and mandatory periodic activity on
                     26:  idle machines wastes power.
                     27: 
1.4       gson       28: There are four main milestones to this project:
1.1       riastrad   29: 
1.3       riastrad   30: 1. Choose a data structure for high-resolution timers, and a way to
                     31:  request high-resolution vs low-resolution sleeps, and adapt the
                     32:  various timeout functions (`cv_timedwait`, etc.) to use it.
                     33: The current call wheel data structure for callouts provides good
                     34:  performance, but only for low-resolution sleeps.
                     35: We need another data structure that provides good performance for
                     36:  high-resolution sleeps without hurting the performance of the existing
                     37:  call wheel for existing applications.
1.1       riastrad   38: 
1.3       riastrad   39: 2. Design a machine-independent high-resolution timer device API,
                     40:  implement it on a couple machines, and develop tests to confirm that
                     41:  it works.
                     42: This might be done by adapting the `struct timecounter` interface to
                     43:  arm it for an interrupt, or might be done another way.
                     44: 
                     45: 3. Convert all the functions of the periodic 10 ms timer, `hardclock`,
1.1       riastrad   46:  to schedule activity only when needed.
                     47: 
1.3       riastrad   48: 4. Convert the various software subsystems that rely on periodic timer
1.1       riastrad   49:  interrupts every tick, or every second, via
1.5       kim        50:  [[!template id=man name="callout" section="9"]],
1.1       riastrad   51:  either to avoid periodic work altogether, or to batch it up only when
                     52:  the machine is about to go idle, in order to reduce the number of
                     53:  wakeups and thereby reduce power consumption.
                     54: """
                     55: ]]
                     56: 
1.3       riastrad   57: [[!tag gsoc]]
1.6     ! martin     58: [[!tag gsoc350h]]