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High Performance Timer – High precision time keeping on Linux systems

Motivation. In contemporary high-speed communication systems, by modelling autonomous mobile robots or in industrial control environments, acquisition of the system time can occur hundred thousand times a second and even more frequently. So the time of this system time acquisition as well as the CPU costs for this must be kept as low as possible. However, during the implementation of any kind of time critical applications, a number of pitfalls on the level of OS can appear soon. Though the Linux OS has already proved itself suitable for embedding into many sizes of projects and offers the ideal development platform, in some applications Linux still shows itself not enough effective. This project aims to solve those problems and improve accuracy of system calls for timing measurements along with reduced CPU resources. While the time acquisition via Unix system interfaces costs up to 2 microseconds, the suggested solution provides time acquisition means with CPU costs of about 100 nsec and less on a standard PC platform and about 200 ns on ARM Cortex A series. The approach for precise timing is available on user-space beyond the standard C++ library. Additionally, the library possesses microsecond-precise process suspension and resuming functions. This feature extends the horizon of time-critical applications in the industrial communications and automation, which can be implemented in high-level programming languages on Linux OS.

Library desciptin. The HPTimer (High Performance Timer) and the corresponding library HighPerTimer present a simple interface for gathering time values from Linux user space. During the initialization stage HPTimer is assigned to the fastest and the most reliable time source available on the given platform. The pitfall here is different architectures use different timer hardware and the given library takes upon itself the identification of the platform and the timer source. Consequently, the further interaction by HPTimer occurs directly with time registers avoiding standard Linux system calls (e.g. clock_gettime or gettimeofday). On ARM Cortex A8/A9/A5 processors, for accessing time hardware, the library needs an additional device driver to be installed and loaded as a module beforehand, as the appropriate time registers are mapped into the protected kernel space. For PC platforms no special drivers are required.

The library provides the following features:

  • automatic detection of the reliable time hardware and ability to change the default time source inside the main routine;
  • manipulation with time accuracy up to nanoseconds;
  • precise sleep functions with reduced CPU usage and appropriate interrupt handlers of the sleeping thread;
  • a set of mathematical and comparison operators of an HPTimer C++ object;
  • support of Intel, AMD, VIA, ARM Cortex A8/A9/A5 processors.

Perfomance information. Below the performance information of some processors is presented. In the table mean values of the cost of setting a timer are shown. Tests have been performed in a loop of 100 million values and possible peaks due to hardware interrupts have not been filtered.

Processor (CPU) Software clock Frequency Cost of system call, µsec Cost of setting HPTimer, µsec
Intel® Core™ i7-2600 1600 MHz 0.031 0.017
Intel® Core™ i5-3337U 1800 MHz 0.044 0.019
AMD Opteron™ 4238 3300 MHz 0.061 0.031
AMD Athlon™ X2 BE-2350 1000 MHz 1.117 1.063
VIA Nano X2 U4025 1067 MHz 0.102 0.038
ARM Cortex A8 24 MHz 1.262 0.391
ARM Cortex A9 32.768 KHz1 –2 0.508
ARM Cortex A5 12 MHz 2.069 0.636

Table 1: Examples of costs of setting timer on different processors

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1HPTimer uses a 19 MHz clock instead

2In the case of the ARM Cortex A9 processor, the system timer has 32.768 K?z frequency with 30.518 usec resolution respectively. In fact, it means that with the standard system call only intervals of more than 30 µsec can be tracked, even with the monotonic time source and CLOCK_MONOTONIC flag

The important advantage of HighPerTimer is a significantly improved precision of sleep functions. In the context of this paper, the term „miss“ of sleep times refers to a delayed wake up from the synchronous sleep call, whereby the quantity of this miss is the time difference between the real return time of sleep against the target wake-up time. Though in the version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, a redesign of timers took place, even in the 3.x kernel versions, this miss is still in the range of 50 µsec (for PC platform) and 100-400 µsec (for ARM processors). So often CPU-costly busy-waits are inserted into communication and control programs to assure precise protocol timings. At this point, the HighPerTimer can provide precise sleep functions, where the CPU overhead during the sleep keeps at 1-1.89 % in contrary to 100 % of busy waits. At the same time the benefits of very accurate process resuming times on long waits are maintained. Below the table of the comparison miss values is shown. It should be considered that for all methods the miss value depends on the sleep interval, so the Table 2 consists of two part, where sleep time is more then 1 msec and where is less. The measurements were performed on the Intel® Core™ i7-2600 processor, for the calculating the mean value it was used a loop of 10000 steps and total performance time of measurements is equal about 830 minutes.

Sleep time >= 1 msec Sleep time < 1 msec CPU usage
Mean miss, µsec Mean miss, µsec
System sleep 61.985 50.879 0.016 %
Busy-waiting loop 0.160 0.070 99.681 %
HPTimer sleep 0.258 0.095 1.892 %

Table 2: The comparison of miss values of different sleep methods

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