Hi Greg, I'm relatively new to this stuff but I think I will make some bold statements: > With linux today, is there a specific process context (ie. kernel > thread) associated with executing functions triggered by timers firing > off? No, a timer being fired wouldn't be associated with any single process, The way the kernel knows about the currently executing process is by means of the kernel stack. Now this stack is different for interrupts and different for process. The interrupt handler calls your registered function, but the current stack is not that of any process but is of the timer interrupt. Plus you wouldn't normally register a timer for a process but would register a global timer when you load your driver. This timer fires periodically and isn't tied to any one process. Usually there is a list of processes sleeping and the timer would wake them under certain conditions. For example with pdflush which is a kernel thread that does deferred work, it is woken up only if it there is some work to do. And it does this work in Process context. So this could be an example of a timer triggering an execution of work in process context. I hope this doesn't confuse everyone even more :) Thanks, -Joel -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
