Documentation: document ktime_get_*() APIs

As Dave Chinner points out, we don't have a proper documentation for the
ktime_get() family of interfaces, making it rather unclear which of the
over 30 (!) interfaces one should actually use in a driver or elsewhere
in the kernel.

I wrote up an explanation from how I personally see the interfaces,
documenting what each of the functions do and hopefully making it a bit
clearer which should be used where.

This is the first time I tried writing .rst format documentation, so
in addition to any mistakes in the content, I probably also introduce
nonstandard formatting ;-)

I first tried to add an extra section to
Documentation/timers/timekeeping.txt, but this is currently not included
in the generated API, and it seems useful to have the API docs as part
of what gets generated in
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/core-api/index.html#core-utilities
instead, so I started a new file there.

I also considered adding the documentation inline in the
include/linux/timekeeping.h header, but couldn't figure out how to do
that in a way that would result both in helpful inline comments as
well as readable html output, so I settled for the latter, with
a small note pointing to it from the header.

Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Stephen Boyd <sboyd@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/timekeeping.h b/include/linux/timekeeping.h
index 86bc2026efce..947b1b8d2d01 100644
--- a/include/linux/timekeeping.h
+++ b/include/linux/timekeeping.h
@@ -21,6 +21,21 @@ extern int do_sys_settimeofday64(const struct timespec64 *tv,
 				 const struct timezone *tz);
 
 /*
+ * ktime_get() family: read the current time in a multitude of ways,
+ *
+ * The default time reference is CLOCK_MONOTONIC, starting at
+ * boot time but not counting the time spent in suspend.
+ * For other references, use the functions with "real", "clocktai",
+ * "boottime" and "raw" suffixes.
+ *
+ * To get the time in a different format, use the ones wit
+ * "ns", "ts64" and "seconds" suffix.
+ *
+ * See Documentation/core-api/timekeeping.rst for more details.
+ */
+
+
+/*
  * timespec64 based interfaces
  */
 extern void ktime_get_raw_ts64(struct timespec64 *ts);