Why jiffies start counting from a negative number and after 5minutes the
counter gets positive????
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 13:12 +0300, linux wrote:
> Why jiffies start counting from a negative number and after 5minutes the
> counter gets positive????
to find bugs in broken drivers who think jiffies doesn't wrap or has an
absolute value...
ok.i see what u mean.
But should this value on a stable version be 0 again???
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 13:28 +0300, linux wrote:
> ok.i see what u mean.
> But should this value on a stable version be 0 again???
why?
"the absolute value has no meaning" -> why would "0" be special ???
Answer: It's not. And actually -5 minutes is more useful than 0 because
it keeps helping finding bugs... why do you want it to start at 0 ?
On Wed, 18 May 2005 20:12, linux wrote:
> Why jiffies start counting from a negative number and after 5minutes the
> counter gets positive????
It's an excellent way to test if jiffy wrap is handled well since it will
happen in 5 minutes instead of 50 days.
Cheers,
Con
On 5/18/05, Arjan van de Ven <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 13:28 +0300, linux wrote:
> > ok.i see what u mean.
> > But should this value on a stable version be 0 again???
>
> why?
> "the absolute value has no meaning" -> why would "0" be special ???
> Answer: It's not. And actually -5 minutes is more useful than 0 because
> it keeps helping finding bugs... why do you want it to start at 0 ?
>
The negative value doesn't hurt. It's unsigned. Maybe he was thinking
reading jiffies as the uptime directly.
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