RFC: better timer interface

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 05:45:07PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> This looks really nice, but what is the long-term plan for the interface?
> Do you expect that we will eventually change all 700+ users of timer_list
> to the new type, or do we keep both variants around indefinitely to avoid
> having to do mass-conversions?

I think we should eventually move everyone over, but it might take
some time.

> If we are going to touch them all in the end, we might want to think
> about other changes that could be useful here. The main one I have
> in mind would be moving away from 'jiffies + timeout' as the interface,
> and instead passing a relative number of milliseconds (or seconds)
> into a mod_timer() variant. This is what most drivers want anyway,
> and if we have both changes (callback argument and expiration
> time) in place, we modernize the API one driver at a time with both
> changes at once.

Yes, that sounds useful to me as well.  As you said it's an independent
but somewhat related change.  I can add it to my series, but I'll
need a suggestions for a good and short name.  That already was the
hardest part for the setup side :)