How long does your nanosleep() really sleep? (2004) | Hacker News Reader

How long does your nanosleep() really sleep? (2004)

dragonflybsd.org

53 pointslkurusa16 comments

This bug is still there in OpenBSD. With the 100Hz tick rate, sleep(10ms) turns effectively into 15 milliseconds, or -- more likely -- 20 milliseconds if the system is lightly loaded and the program doesn't spend much of its timeslice.

Of course, some programs don't expect this.

Fun story, me and my little sister played a game online years ago. The Mana World. A game with an OpenBSD port. She teamed up with some guy in game. She also told me that guy had a terrible internet connection & slow PC. So once I found them, I watched this guy lag and move about in slow motion. I asked if he's running OpenBSD. He said he's running OpenBSD. I sent him a little patch and it's like he got a new PC and a new internet connection, just like that.. :-)

do you have a link to this little patch so that I can refer to this post at some point in the future?

can you put this patch up somewhere, e.g gist.github.com or something? or atleast point us where to look exactly? thank you :)

Why, do you work on TMW?

Like I said, it was years ago. If I still have the patch, it's got to be on one of these spinning rust disks sitting in my closet. I'm on a trip so I really can't look for it now.

Assuming the client is still buggy (things like SDL2 have happened so who knows?), I'd probably look here first:

https://gitlab.com/manaplus/manaplus/blob/485e9bb12bf5dda318...

The logic won't run right if the timer is implemented with a sleep that ends up sleeping much longer than intended. If it works like it did back then (sleep is virtually always 20ms), simply incrementing the tick count by two every time should be enough to make it smooth on OpenBSD. Of course the correct fix is to keep track of actual time spent and adjust ticks accordingly. Or use a timer mechanism that has higher precision. IIRC setitimer[1] can get you a regular 100Hz alarm on OpenBSD.

http://man.openbsd.org/setitimer.2

If I'm not entirely mistaken, the old userspace implementation of pthreads worked with a 100Hz timer using this mechanism.

>Why, do you work on TMW?

oh, no. i'm just curious

On modern FreeBSD, when I run the article's demo program, by default I see even higher and more variable latency than the author observed in 2004:

However, when I set the kern.timecounter.alloweddeviation sysctl ("Allowed time interval deviation in percents") to 0 (from the default of 5%), I get very low and consistently low latency:

There are pros and cons to both defaults.

Can you elaborate on the cons?

From what I've heard about other systems, if the system is given some wiggle room in when it runs tasks, then it can often run multiple tasks in a single wakeup, instead of waking up for one task, doing it, going to sleep for a very short time, waking up to do the second, etc. Wakeups, from what I've heard, carry overhead and increase power consumption, which may matter. (Also, if the CPUs are normally fully busy with user programs instead of fully asleep with zero tasks, replace "wakeup" with "context switch into the kernel".)

I don't know if this is what loeg had in mind, and I have not investigated the subject myself.

This is exactly the right idea.

Sure thing.

Why make wakeup imprecise by default? The slop allows for some coalescing of nearby (in time) events into a single wakeup, saving power[0]. This article provides some figures that give a good intuition for why this might work: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-w...

See also: tickless kernels in general[1]; FreeBSD switched to a tickless kernel with coalescing about 5.5 years ago[2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickless_kernel

[2]: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=24777...

Yes it's true. This kernel has no tick.

"Well, that's what I heard!"

I agree that this can be beneficial, but do any BSDs support any laptop hardware as easily or as well as Linux does? Even assuming that hardware support is there, does the battery life even compare well to Linux on the same hardware, let alone Windows 10?

If one of the best kept secrets of open source is that some BSD somewhere has great hardware support and battery life better than Windows and Linux... that would be awesome!

To answer the broad question, yes, some BSDs (FreeBSD) support some laptop hardware[0] as well as Linux does. And yes, the battery life is comparable. FreeBSD has good support for idling in C-states, which is where most of your CPU power saving comes from; support for setting and managing P-states (which no longer have much impact on modern Intel CPUs, but mattered historically) via e.g., "powerd;" and support for wifi power saving modes and screen dimming (other big power draws).

The question that was sort of implied but not directly asked might be: if you pick a random laptop, do I think it's likely a BSD will support it better than Linux? And there I think the honest answer is "no." Linux definitely has an advantage in breadth of driver coverage.

In many ways FreeBSD is a well-kept "secret," but it's not a panacea.

[0]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Solaris 8 briefly had a kernel bug such that usleep() didn't sleep at all. I don't recall the details, just that after patching the system and rebooting things were behaving very bizarrely. I eventually realised the sleep command was returning instantly and from that tracked it to the system call, and then found a patch for the issue. Google is failing me in digging up any details. It would've been in the 2000-2004 time frame.

EDIT: Oy, TFA is from 2004. Never mind my comment about Solaris 8 being ancient.

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