NAME¶
hpet
—
High Precision Event Timer driver
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
configuration file:
device acpi
The following tunables are settable from the
loader(8):
- hint.hpet.X.allowed_irqs
- is a 32bit mask. Each set bit allows driver to use respective IRQ, if BIOS
also set respective capability bit in comparator's configuration register.
Default value is 0xffff0000, except some known broken hardware.
- hint.hpet.X.clock
- controls event timers functionality support. Setting to 0, disables it.
Default value is 1.
- hint.hpet.X.legacy_route
- controls "LegacyReplacement Route" mode. If enabled, HPET will
steal IRQ0 of i8254 timer and IRQ8 of RTC. Before using it, make sure that
respective drivers are not using interrupts, by setting also:
hint.attimer.0.clock=0
hint.atrtc.0.clock=0
Default value is 0.
- hint.hpet.X.per_cpu
- controls how much per-CPU event timers should driver attempt to register.
This functionality requires every comparator in a group to have own
unshared IRQ, so it depends on hardware capabilities and interrupts
configuration. Default value is 1.
DESCRIPTION¶
This driver uses High Precision Event Timer hardware (part of the chipset,
usually enumerated via ACPI) to supply kernel with one time counter and
several (usually from 3 to 8) event timers. This hardware includes single main
counter with known increment frequency (10MHz or more), and several
programmable comparators (optionally with automatic reload feature). When
value of the main counter matches current value of any comparator, interrupt
can be generated. Depending on hardware capabilities and configuration,
interrupt can be delivered as regular I/O APIC interrupt (ISA or PCI) in range
from 0 to 31, or as Front Side Bus interrupt, alike to PCI MSI interrupts, or
in so called "LegacyReplacement Route" HPET can steal IRQ0 of i8254
and IRQ8 of the RTC. Interrupt can be either edge- or level-triggered. In last
case they could be safely shared with PCI IRQs. Driver prefers to use FSB
interrupts, if supported, to avoid sharing. If it is not possible, it uses
single sharable IRQ from PCI range. Other modes (LegacyReplacement and ISA
IRQs) require special care to setup, but could be configured manually via
device hints.
Event timers provided by the driver support both one-shot an periodic modes and
irrelevant to CPU power states.
Depending on hardware capabilities and configuration, driver can expose each
comparator as separate event timer or group them into one or several per-CPU
event timers. In last case interrupt of every of those comparators within
group is bound to specific CPU core. This is possible only when each of these
comparators has own unsharable IRQ.
SEE ALSO¶
acpi(4),
apic(4),
atrtc(4),
attimer(4),
eventtimers(4),
timecounters(4)
HISTORY¶
The
hpet
driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 6.3. Support for event timers was added in
FreeBSD 9.0.