Tickless Technology And Its Application In Embedded System

Tickless is a new timing mechanism which was introduced in Linux kernel which displaced the periodic timer interrupt with one-shot timer interrupt.Tickless can improve the efficiency of Linux kernel. Combined with chip-scale energy saving technologies, this mechanism is able to reduce system power consumption. This virtue of Tickless is very important for computer applications in a lot of scenarios, especially for the applications of embedded systems. On the other hand, Tickless leads to the fine-grained timing, and it provides basis for high resolution timer.However, Tickless is a new conception so that it has not been widely used. Even in the latest version of Linux kernel, lots of architectures lack codes for Tickless. So, how to generalized this mechanism is a valuable research direction, which will be studied in this paperIn this paper, the principle of this mechanism will be analyzed and the basic model of Tickless will be summed up. Finally, a new realization method for Tickless is proposed, and high resolution timer is realized on this basis. The test results show that the new method can reduce the energy consumption of embedded system and improve the accuracy of OS timer.The research in this paper can make Tickless widely used in embedded operating systems and improve the effectiveness of these systems.