How do I schedule a userspace application to run at regular intervals

AustinMarton · 08-03-2009, 10:10 PM

Hello,

I am writing a userspace application to send out a packet on uClinux on Nios2, it needs to be run at regular intervals (from about 1 to 64 times a second - to be set by user) but the timing does not need to be accurate (otherwise I would use a hardware counter to generate interrupts).

Can I some how create a software interrupt/timer overflow or something along those lines to start my application every second? Or some way I can use a shell script to start it?

I have read up about Kernel Timers but I would prefer to not have to write another driver.

I could just wrap the program in a while loop with a delay but this seems very crude. This is an embedded system so there is a need to conserve resources.

Thanks,
Austin.

Guttorm · 08-04-2009, 04:12 AM

Hi

No matter how you do it, starting a program every second will take quite a lot of resources. So I think it's better to have the program start once and then just sleep/usleep/nanosleep in the while loop. Why do you think it's "very crude"?

jlinkels · 08-04-2009, 06:25 PM

It is not crude to delay a process. If you sleep a process it is simply not run by the kernel until the moment the sleep timer expires, and it doesn't take up any resources.

For repeating jobs with a period less than 2 minutes, it is recommended to start the process once and have a sleep to schedule when parts of the program must be run.

jlinkels

AustinMarton · 08-04-2009, 11:32 PM

Great! Thanks! That makes sense, I will use a mdelay/udelay combo.

The reason for my crude comment was I thought that if I had a loop like:

Code:

for (i=0;i<100000000;i++);

that it would use cpu resources??

chrism01 · 08-05-2009, 12:22 AM

Use

Code:

while(1)
{
    <your code>

    /* some sleep, pick a number */
    usleep(5); 
}