[U-Boot] [RFC][Timer API] Revised Specification - Implementation details

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Scott McNutt,

In message <4DDFA206.5050101 at psyent.com> you wrote:
>
> >>> Besides, Nios can return an increment of 10 (presumably ms) between
> >>> two immediately consecutive calls. This causes early timeouts in CFI
> >>> driver
...
> And this is what reset_timer() corrected.

I cannot see how reset_timer() could ever correct the bug that two
seuccessive calls to get_timer() return an delta of 10 milliseconds?

> > Agreed, but that is not something I can achieve - I don't want to hold
> > up this whole show that we have all put so much effort into for the
> > sake of one weak function
> 
> And I don't want to see something that currently works become broken
> because we "improved" a feature ... simply because the resolution of
> the timestamp is 10 msec rather than 1 msec.

We agree on that.  Yet, an implementation with a  resolution of 10
milliseconds must only return a new values (incremented by ten
missiseconds) after (at least) 10 milliseconds have passed.

What I've been told is that this condition is violated in the code,
which would be a bug that needs to be fixed.

> And just to be clear. This is not a Nios issue. Currently, if the
> timestamp is incremented via a fixed period interrupt, and the period
> of the interrupt is longer that 1 msec, calls to get_timer() may
> produce early timeouts ... regardless of platform.

Please point out which other implementations show this problem, too,
so we can fix these as well.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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