1 delays - Information on the various kernel delay / sleep mechanisms
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4 This document seeks to answer the common question: "What is the
5 RightWay (TM) to insert a delay?"
7 This question is most often faced by driver writers who have to
8 deal with hardware delays and who may not be the most intimately
9 familiar with the inner workings of the Linux Kernel.
15 The first, and most important, question you need to ask is "Is my
16 code in an atomic context?" This should be followed closely by "Does
17 it really need to delay in atomic context?" If so...
20 You must use the *delay family of functions. These
21 functions use the jiffie estimation of clock speed
22 and will busy wait for enough loop cycles to achieve
25 ndelay(unsigned long nsecs)
26 udelay(unsigned long usecs)
27 mdelay(unsgined long msecs)
29 udelay is the generally preferred API; ndelay-level
30 precision may not actually exist on many non-PC devices.
32 mdelay is macro wrapper around udelay, to account for
33 possible overflow when passing large arguments to udelay.
34 In general, use of mdelay is discouraged and code should
35 be refactored to allow for the use of msleep.
38 You should use the *sleep[_range] family of functions.
39 There are a few more options here, while any of them may
40 work correctly, using the "right" sleep function will
41 help the scheduler, power management, and just make your
44 -- Backed by busy-wait loop:
45 udelay(unsigned long usecs)
46 -- Backed by hrtimers:
47 usleep_range(unsigned long min, unsigned long max)
48 -- Backed by jiffies / legacy_timers
49 msleep(unsigned long msecs)
50 msleep_interruptible(unsigned long msecs)
52 Unlike the *delay family, the underlying mechanism
53 driving each of these calls varies, thus there are
54 quirks you should be aware of.
57 SLEEPING FOR "A FEW" USECS ( < ~10us? ):
61 On slower systems, (embedded, OR perhaps a speed-
62 stepped PC!) the overhead of setting up the hrtimers
63 for usleep *may* not be worth it. Such an evaluation
64 will obviously depend on your specific situation, but
65 it is something to be aware of.
67 SLEEPING FOR ~USECS OR SMALL MSECS ( 10us - 20ms):
70 - Why not msleep for (1ms - 20ms)?
71 Explained originally here:
72 http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/3/250
73 msleep(1~20) may not do what the caller intends, and
74 will often sleep longer (~20 ms actual sleep for any
75 value given in the 1~20ms range). In many cases this
76 is not the desired behavior.
78 - Why is there no "usleep" / What is a good range?
79 Since usleep_range is built on top of hrtimers, the
80 wakeup will be very precise (ish), thus a simple
81 usleep function would likely introduce a large number
82 of undesired interrupts.
84 With the introduction of a range, the scheduler is
85 free to coalesce your wakeup with any other wakeup
86 that may have happened for other reasons, or at the
87 worst case, fire an interrupt for your upper bound.
89 The larger a range you supply, the greater a chance
90 that you will not trigger an interrupt; this should
91 be balanced with what is an acceptable upper bound on
92 delay / performance for your specific code path. Exact
93 tolerances here are very situation specific, thus it
94 is left to the caller to determine a reasonable range.
96 SLEEPING FOR LARGER MSECS ( 10ms+ )
97 * Use msleep or possibly msleep_interruptible
99 - What's the difference?
100 msleep sets the current task to TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE
101 whereas msleep_interruptible sets the current task to
102 TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE before scheduling the sleep. In
103 short, the difference is whether the sleep can be ended
104 early by a signal. In general, just use msleep unless
105 you know you have a need for the interruptible variant.