Timers and Synchronization
[Environmental Management]

Collaboration diagram for Timers and Synchronization:

On the PPU "gettimeofday()" from time.h is used, because it is the only function which seems to work ("clock()" from time.h always returns 0).

On the SPU there are two implementations. One uses also "gettimeofday()" and the other uses the spu-timer-library. The reason for this lies in the fact, that the spu-timer-library was marked as prototype in Cell SDK 3.0 and the future development of this library was uncertain. Cell SDK 3.1 has integrated the spu-timer-library in the main-library and so the gettimeofday-implementation is now obsolete.

Note:

The timebase-constant which is needed to calculate time is hardcoded, because there was no according function for retrieving this value in Cell SDK 3.0 and we had only access to a playstation 3. Now Cell SDK 3.1 provides a function for retrieving the timebase value, but we didn't use it to provide backwards-compatibility. So if you plan to use MOC on another platform than playstation 3 keep in mind to check if the timebase-value is correct.