tree 151f7fbb135053945fc6eae99c9175e860ad343c
parent ff3ead96d17f47ee70c294a5cc2cce9b61e82f0f
author John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org> 1294768473 -0800
committer John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org> 1303851706 -0700

timers: Posix interface for alarm-timers

This patch exposes alarm-timers to userland via the posix clock
and timers interface, using two new clockids: CLOCK_REALTIME_ALARM
and CLOCK_BOOTTIME_ALARM. Both clockids behave identically to
CLOCK_REALTIME and CLOCK_BOOTTIME, respectively, but timers
set against the _ALARM suffixed clockids will wake the system if
it is suspended.

Some background can be found here:
	https://lwn.net/Articles/429925/

The concept for Alarm-timers was inspired by the Android Alarm
driver (by Arve Hjønnevåg) found in the Android kernel tree.

See: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=kernel/common.git;a=blob;f=drivers/rtc/alarm.c;h=1250edfbdf3302f5e4ea6194847c6ef4bb7beb1c;hb=android-2.6.36

While the in-kernel interface is pretty similar between
alarm-timers and Android alarm driver, the user-space interface
for the Android alarm driver is via ioctls to a new char device.
As mentioned above, I've instead chosen to export this functionality
via the posix interface, as it seemed a little simpler and avoids
creating duplicate interfaces to things like CLOCK_REALTIME and
CLOCK_MONOTONIC under alternate names (ie:ANDROID_ALARM_RTC and
ANDROID_ALARM_SYSTEMTIME).

The semantics of the Android alarm driver are different from what
this posix interface provides. For instance, threads other then
the thread waiting on the Android alarm driver are able to modify
the alarm being waited on. Also this interface does not allow
the same wakelock semantics that the Android driver provides
(ie: kernel takes a wakelock on RTC alarm-interupt, and holds it
through process wakeup, and while the process runs, until the
process either closes the char device or calls back in to wait
on a new alarm).

One potential way to implement similar semantics may be via
the timerfd infrastructure, but this needs more research.

There may also need to be some sort of sysfs system level policy
hooks that allow alarm timers to be disabled to keep them
from firing at inappropriate times (ie: laptop in a well insulated
bag, mid-flight).

CC: Arve Hjønnevåg <arve@android.com>
CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
CC: Alessandro Zummo <a.zummo@towertech.it>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>