Since we're now able to search from a precise expiration date in
the timer tree using ebtree 4.1, we don't need to maintain 4 trees
anymore. Not only does this simplify the code a lot, but it also
ensures that we can always look 24 days back and ahead, which
doubles the ability of the previous scheduler. Indeed, while based
on absolute values, the timer tree is now relative to <now> as we
can always search from <now>-31 bits.
The run queue uses the exact same principle now, and is now simpler
and a bit faster to process. With these changes alone, an overall
0.5% performance gain was observed.
Tests were performed on the few wrapping cases and everything works
as expected.
Most of the time, task_queue() will immediately return. By extracting
the preliminary checks and putting them in an inline function, we can
significantly reduce the number of calls to the function itself, and
most of the tests can be optimized away due to the caller's context.
Another minor improvement in process_runnable_tasks() consisted in
taking benefit from the processor's branch prediction unit by making
a special case of the process_session() callback which is by far the
most common one.
All this improved performance by about 1%, mainly during the call
from process_runnable_tasks().
Timers are unsigned and used as tree positions. Ticks are signed and
used as absolute date within current time frame. While the two are
normally equal (except zero), it's important not to confuse them in
the code as they are not interchangeable.
We add two inline functions to turn each one into the other.
The comments have also been moved to the proper location, as it was
not easy to understand what was a tick and what was a timer unit.
This is the first attempt at moving all internal parts from
using struct timeval to integer ticks. Those provides simpler
and faster code due to simplified operations, and this change
also saved about 64 bytes per session.
A new header file has been added : include/common/ticks.h.
It is possible that some functions should finally not be inlined
because they're used quite a lot (eg: tick_first, tick_add_ifset
and tick_is_expired). More measurements are required in order to
decide whether this is interesting or not.
Some function and variable names are still subject to change for
a better overall logics.
