If your system needs to manage power consumption, you can set up your timers to help the system to sleep for longer intervals, saving power.
The kernel can reduce power consumption by running in tickless mode, although this is a bit of a misnomer. The system still has clock ticks, and everything runs as normal unless the system is idle. Only when the system goes completely idle does the kernel "turn off" clock ticks, and in reality what it does is slow down the clock so that the next tick interrupt occurs just after the next active timer is to fire.
In order for the kernel to enter tickless mode, the following must all be true:
If the kernel decides to enter tickless mode, it determines the number of nanoseconds until the next timer is supposed to expire. If that expiry is more than a certain time away, the kernel reprograms the timer hardware to generate its next interrupt shortly after that, and then sets some variables to indicate that it's gone tickless. When something other than the idle thread is made ready, the kernel stops tickless operation, checks the list of active timers, and fires off any that were supposed to expire before it went to sleep.
So, what can you do to help?
If your timer doesn't have to be too precise, you can give it a tolerance value; the kernel then uses the expiry time plus the tolerance to decide if it should enter tickless operation or a low-power mode.
To set the tolerance for a timer, call one of the following functions, specifying the TIMER_TOLERANCE flag:
For TimerSettime(), if the itime argument is non-NULL, the value it points to indicates the tolerance. If the otime argument is non-NULL, the previous tolerance value is stored in the memory it points to. You can call TimerSettime() with this flag at any point after calling TimerCreate(), without affecting the active/inactive status of the timer.
To determine the tolerance for a timer, call TimerInfo(), specifying the _NTO_TI_REPORT_TOLERANCE flag; the function puts the tolerance in the otime.interval_nsec field.
It's also possible to set a default timer tolerance for a process, to be used for timers that don't have a specific tolerance, by calling procmgr_timer_tolerance(). The default timer tolerance is inherited across a fork(), but not an exec*() or a spawn*().
Another way to reduce power consumption is to use "lazy" interrupts; for more information, see "Interrupts and power management" in the Writing an Interrupt Handler chapter in this guide.
Here are some tips for helping the kernel reduce power consumption:
Typical implementations of polling loops give the kernel no option to delay your application's execution when in low-power mode. On every iteration of your loop, you wake up the system and cause extra power usage as a result.
Polling loops are commonly caused by using the following functions in an unbounded loop:
If you must use a polling loop, make its interval and tolerance as long as possible. This will minimize the power impact while allowing the kernel (through timer tolerance) to batch as many wakeups as possible.
When setting up a timer, you can specify how much tolerance the kernel is allowed when scheduling your thread after the timer fires. The kernel uses your timer's tolerance only when the system isn't awake. Essentially, tolerance allows the system to sleep longer and then do more work when it does wake up.
The select() and poll() functions can't use a tolerant timer. You can duplicate the behavior of these functions by using ionotify(), while using a tolerant timer for the timeout. Using this method also has the advantage of providing a normal QNX Neutrino pulse when input is available, letting you use your application's existing MsgReceive() loop.