The Design And Realization Of The Linux Kernel, A High Precision Timer

The increasing growth of new services makes the competition among tele-operating corperations become more and more fierce. To support them survive in the competition, the industry leaders, such as Intel and IBM, initiate the concept of"standard-based modularized network platform"which differentiates from the proprietary platform. The new network platform requires the hardwares, operating systems, middlewares and the interfaces of application totally based on open standards. All parts of the platform are organized by modules.Standardization enables every module in the platform could be supported by various providers and the competition among providers results in the cost effect, and also, the modularization greatly speeds up the construction of services supported by telecom. So the standard-based modularized network platform not only reduces the cost of operator but also shortens the time to market for the operator.As the core of standard-based modularized network platform, CGL(Carrier Grade Linux), which focuses on telecom services, is initialized by open source organization OSDL(Open Source Development Lab). Based on generic release of Linux, CGL adds a series of features to meet the telecom grade needs. High-resolution timer is one of enhancements for soft real-time performance in generic Linux whose interfaces conform to the POSIX1003.1b API. This thesis firstly introduces the clock and timer in standard kernel 2.6.10, Secondly describes design and implementation of high-resolution timer, at last, summarizes the performance of high-resolution timer and draws a conclusion.