[fpc-pascal] spin_lock

[Burkhard Carstens]

Am Dienstag, 30. Mai 2006 22:24 schrieb Alain Michaud:
> > You might want to give some more details about your "situation".
> > arch? os? and why would you do this? There might be a better
> > solution.. than locking the hole system for 1/5 second ..
> >
> > Burkhard
>
> Hi,
>
> I feel a little bit guilty to use this list for my personal problems,
> but here it is:
>
> I use one of those (ISA) I/O bards: I write or read from a port and
> control a "slow" experiment. More details about the timing:
>
> I can trigger the experiment at any time I like. In fact, this is not
> realy a "REAL TIME" experiment.  Typically I use the TTimer component
> which will "fire" every 10 seconds os so. This is easy!
>
> Once the experiment has been started, then I monitor a voltage from
> the same I/O board. Subsequently I plot the measured voltage
> waveform, save the numbers on disk, wait for the laser to cool down,
> and repeat the measurement. All this house cleaning is done AFTER the
> experiment is finished therefore there is no timing problem. The only
> 'critical' section is during the acquisition ('monitor') period. In
> fact this not too critical either:
>
> After the experiment has been trigered, I want to read one value
> every milisecond for a total period of 200 milisecond MAXIMUM.
> Moreover the jitter (fluctuation) on the sampling can be as large as
> 0.1 milisecond. This is very easy to do. In fact I can just do a loop
> and monitor the time counter, and call the driver to do a read as
> soon as one milisecond has elapsed!  I have done some tests already
> and this will meet my requirement!  Now the problem...
>
> THE PROBLEM...
>
>  The problem: the problem is: even if the timing is not so critical
> and the the experiment does not last for long, once it has started
> then the processor should not leave and go answer the phone for
> another process... I think that most process can be delayed for 200ms
> but my acquisition loop should NOT be interrupted while it is doing
> its thing.
>
> Now, I know that I can use spin-lock while I am in the device driver
> in kernel space, but if I do that, then I have to take care of the
> timing in the driver as well. It would be the driver who would be
> responsible for the whole acquisition sequence.
>
> I would realy prefer to do the timing in my pascal program and call
> the driver to read the bytes only. This would be easier to program!
> and more flexible (not as fast of course but this is OK).

So what about this:
modify your drivers sample routine that it takes a timestamp 
(time_for_next_sample) and returns a timestamp (last_sampled) together 
with your voltage value. in the sample routine take your spin_lock, 
loop until currenttime > time_for_next_sample, get your value, get a 
timestamp, spin_unlock, return values;
now your pascal program can call the sample-routine again with 
time_for_next_sample:=first_time_stamp+(sampleIdx * deltaTime) ..
This way, it's still the pascal program, that specifies the sampling 
rate .. 


> The only way to acheive what I have just described is to disable the
> interrupts or use a "spinlock". Again, I would prefer to do it in my
> pascal code. I realy prefer programming Pascal than "kernel C"!

That's understandable, me too. But I had to write a kernel driver for a 
self-made pci board doing 2.6mbyte DMA data input constantly for 
several hours. With the help of "Linux Device Drivers" book
(read online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdrive3/book/index.csp)
I managed to write that thing within less than a week, without having 
written any piece o C code before .. 
IOW, it's not that hard.

And in kernel driver, you could take advantage of timers/softinterrupts

> Now I should mention that I am in Mandriva Linux, the kernel is
> 2.6.12.
>
> I used to do this in Windows 3.1 and DOS. There were no problems. I
> would just put $FA$ (CLI) and $FF$ (STI) that would disable and
> enable interrupts, but now with Windows XP, those tricks are not
> possible anymore!  This is what they call 'progress'.
>
> Question:
>
> Can I use "asm CLI end;"  and "asm STI end;" in my pascal code?

I don't think it's a good idea. think e.g. of disabling IRQs, then 
accessing some memory that currently is paged out to swap file, the 
kernel would need to page it back into ram, but can't read the disk 
without IRQs

> Is there any trick that I can use to have high priority for a short
> period of time (100ms)?

use nice to give your process the highest possible priority (-20)?
But however, I guess kernel(drivers) still might jump in to respont to 
any IRQs (e.g. from ISDN board) ...

>
> Is there a way to suspend all other processes?
- nice to set them to low priority
- run as console-program in runlevel 3 or even 1 (without X / single 
user mode)
This would still leave the problem of any kernel driver blocking 

Burkhard