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Date:      Mon, 22 Sep 1997 13:05:28 -0600 (MDT)
From:      Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
To:        "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@plutotech.com>
Cc:        Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, nate@mt.sri.com, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/conf files src/sys/dev/vx if_vx.c if_vxreg.h src/sys/i386/apm apm.c src/sys/i386/conf GENERIC files.i386 
Message-ID:  <199709221905.NAA02100@rocky.mt.sri.com>
In-Reply-To: <199709221559.JAA17865@pluto.plutotech.com>
References:  <199709220647.XAA16869@usr07.primenet.com> <199709221559.JAA17865@pluto.plutotech.com>

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> >A more deterministic implementation would associate an absolute tick
> >value (rather than a count) with each entry, and insert entries in
> >sorted order.
> 
> More deterministic for who?  This trades O(1) insertion for O(hash chain
> length) insertion so that softclock will become O(timeouts for the current 
> tick).  As timeout often is called from an interrupt context
> it is not so clear where it is better to pay the price of non-determinism.
> Softclock has the luxury of lowering it's spl at deterministic intervals
> (see the implementation) while a caller from an interrupt context doesn't.
> the current implementation always blocks interrupts for a deterministic
> amount of time.  What you propose doesn't.

>From reading the papers, the performance would be neglidgable (sp?)
since they assume the hash chain length is <= 1.  That's one of the
performance gains they assume.

> Even so, it is probably better to store an absolute tick value regardless
> so that you don't have to perform the subtraction.

A substraction is *dirt cheap* to do.  Finding the element on the list
is much more expensive than the subtraction.



Nate



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