UTSA CS 4953 Special Studies in Computer Science:
Advanced Topics in Concurrency and Communication Fall 2003

Assignment 1 Comments

• There was not much to worry about as far as unsafe functions are concerned.
  You do not have to block the signal inside the signal handler.
• When implementing absolute time with relative time, you need to worry about what happens when the next absolute time has already expired.
  Never set the value argument to a negative value.
  You should check that you are not setting it to 0
• Conclusions should directly quote specific numbers from your output rather than just talk about generalities: x has less error than y ...
• Using a large spin time, say 10 ms may not be the best value.
• There should be as little delay as possible between the call to gettimeofday and the setting of the timer. The gettimeofday should not be called before spinit.
• One interesting question is how is periodic time implemented on each system. It seems that on the Sun the results are similar to absolute time while some people found that under Linux periodic time behaves more like relative time.
• Converting a time interval to a double should not be a problem, but what about converting an absolute time to a double?