delay_15us implementation using PIT polling

[640-KB]

Here is an alternate implementation of delay_15us that polls the PIT counters for accurate delays that will work on non-AT systems. This may address #50 and is in response to your #50 (comment). :)

Note: This is the (slightly modified) code I've used in GLaBIOS for such delays, so it is pretty well-tested. However, you'll want to give it a good amount of actual testing within your own codebase for sure.

[skiselev]

Thanks for your contribution again!
My only concern with this change that for small values of delay (e.g. floppy code has 3 * 15 us delay), the overhead will be larger than the requested delay. But looking at the code it shouldn't hurt much.

[640-KB]

Yes, that occurred to me too, as I just used units of 1ms (to make sure any overhead error was insignificant). Always wondered exactly what that overhead might be and the minimal useful delay you could do in a callable proc. So... I did some tests using MartyPC where we can measure calls with clock cycle and time accuracy to get the exact overhead.

At 4.77MHz/8088, the CALL/RET overhead (including register PUSH/POP) for the PIT polling version of delay_15us is 97μs. The overhead in the other two implementations is similar at 86μs, because they only do two PUSH/POPs instead of four.

For the 45μs call, the PIT polling version takes about 180μs to complete, due to having to do three cycles of reading the timer. I couldn't test the AT_DELAY version since MartyPC doesn't support the AT style PPI refresh bit, though I'd estimate the accuracy may be a little bit better for the 45μs loop -- taking around 100-120μs depending on how you hit it. In the case of resetting the floppy controller, to your point, a very small extra delay is fine (better higher than lower).

On longer loops such as the 3000H * 15μs, that error goes way down to 0.63%. At 7.14MHz, the error will of course be further reduced, with 120μs for the 45μs, and 0.60% error for the 3000H loop. At that point, there wouldn't be any meaningful difference between this and the AT_DELAY version so we should be good!