[Haskell-cafe] Announce: Package rdtsc for reading IA-32 time stamp counters

[Yitzchak Gale]

On 1/2/07, Martin Grabmueller wrote:
> version 1.0 of package rdtsc has just been released.
> This small package contains one module called 'Rdtsc.Rdtsc'.
> This module provides the function 'rdtsc' for accessing
> the 'rdtsc' machine register on modern IA-32 processors.

Very nice!

I have a few comments:

1. What happens when someone tries this on a platform
other than IA-32? I would hope for some predictable
exception to be thrown (hopefully not a segfault).

Hmm, checking System.Info.arch would probably
cost a few cycles. I wonder how much difference that
would make. Or maybe there is a CPP macro
that could hide this function completely on non-IA-32?

2. Shouldn't this module be called System.Rtdsc? Or
maybe even System.CPUTime.Rdtsc (even though
to a systems person this is a very different animal,
something feels right about that to me. I think that
is where most people would look for it first.).

> ...note that you can get strange results
> sometimes on a superscalar processor.

There are a number of serious problems with using
RDTSC, so anyone using it should first read up
about it. In particular: using it on a very old machine
could prevent Linux from booting; using it on
recent high-end machines can be very inaccurate
(as Martin pointed out). Microsoft "strongly
discourages" its use on Windows.

That said, in practice many people find RDTSC
very useful.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDTSC

Thanks for posting this module.

Regards,
Yitz