Re: Why HZ on i386 is 100 ?

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Tue, 16 Apr 2002 22:34:01 -0700 (PDT)


On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Mark Mielke wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 08:57:09PM -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> >
> > Because that is what Alpha does? It seems to me there is no reason for
> > a power-of-two timer value, and using 1024 vs 1000 just makes the math
> > and rounding more difficult.
>
> Only from the perspective of time displayed to a user... :-)

No, it also makes it much easier to convert to/from the standard UNIX time
formats (ie "struct timeval" and "struct timespec") without any surprises,
because a jiffy is exactly representable in both if you have a HZ value
of 100 or 100, but not if your HZ is 1024.

Linus

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