LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 10:12:57 +1030

timer (interrupt) cards for linux

Can anyone tell me the name/brand of a suitable 
card to put into a linux computer to generate
programmable timer interrupts at a 500 uS resolution
or better?

I've tried looking around with Google, but all I seem to find are:

1.	Timers with 2 mS resolution or worse.
2.	Timers for external voltages (i.e. not generating
	CPU interrupts).
3.	Watchdog timers which will reset the mainboard,
	but not generate simple interrupts.

What I'm looking for is something that has at least the
capability of my old Atari ST, which had 3 programmable timers
in a mainboard timer chip. With this, I could generate
one-off or repeating interrupts by programming the chip
in assembly language through memory-mapped registers.

Someone out there must know of a suitable card.
Either PCI or ISA should be okay.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-----------------------------------------------------------
PS. On an unrelated matter, while I was just overseas for a 
couple of weeks, the electricity to my suburb was cut off,
and my web site was off air for 72 hours because the file
system was damaged. It took me 1 hour over the phone from Europe
to get it sort of fixed. I lost a couple of months of various
log files somehow.

It seems to me that the way they do rotation 1-hour shutdowns
of electricity (reportedly every time the electricity company
wants to sell our electricity interstate at a higher price)
seems to be due to concern at being sued for spoiling of food
in refrigerators.
But for computers, it's the _number_ of shutdowns that matters,
not so much the duration.
Heaps of people must have their file systems damaged every time
the electricity is cut off.
I don't understand why there isn't public complaint at the
state of our electricty supply.
I was in Los Angeles until a few hours before that city had
cut-offs directly related to the deregulation of electricity
there. 
Watching the news broadcasts about this (including pictures of
a truck which ran at 110 km/hour into the Californian
legislature building, possibly in protest), I thought,
this is what we're heading towards in Adelaide.
Namely, the outward flight of industry and civil disruption.

Every time our electricity is turned off to sell interstate,
thousands of people in Adelaide must be sitting around for
a couple of hours fixing their file systems.
There should be compensation for this.
Or at least some sort of sanction.
Linux computers, running typically 24 hrs/day, are the most
vulnerable to the 3rd world standard of power supply that we
can now expect as the norm.

-- 
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