MPC8xx: resolution of gettimeofday() ?

Steven Scholz steven.scholz at imc-berlin.de
Fri May 19 01:10:40 EST 2006


Hi all,

what is the resolution of gettimeofday() for an MPC8xx?

IIUC then the "decrementer" is used to generate the timer interrupts every 10ms.

This decrementer runs at cpuclk/16. Thus with 80MHz CPU clock has a
resolution of 16/80MHz = 200ns and overflows every 50000 ticks.

But is this decrementer used to update xtime?
Will gettimeofday() have a resolution of 200ns?

How about linux 2.4 where xtime is a "struct timeval" rather then "struct
timespec"?

This trivial test programm

	struct timeval first, next;
	double diff;

	gettimeofday(&first, NULL);
	do {
		gettimeofday(&next, NULL);
	} while (first.tv_usec == next.tv_usec &&
		 first.tv_sec == next.tv_sec);

	diff  = ((double)  next.tv_sec - (double) first.tv_sec) * 1e6;
	diff +=  (double) (next.tv_usec - first.tv_usec);

	printf ("Resolution gettimeofday() = %g µs\n", diff);

says it's between 13 - 16 µs on a linux-2.4.20. Could that be? how does this
relate to the decrementer frequency?

Thanks a million!

--
Steven



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