time.h design issues
Ulrich Drepper
drepper at cygnus.com
Sun Aug 29 16:56:37 UTC 1999
Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun.com> writes:
> I agree that my proposed API is still too complicated. When I get the
> time I'll try to simplify it. Your code is a valuable resource in
> this area: implementation experience counts for a lot in my book.
Well, then I hope you suggest an implementation for a monotonic time
implementation. Constraints are:
The underlying OS will not notify each running program about a sudden
clock change and itself does not provide a monotonic clock.
In this situation the only thing you can count on are some hardware
"clocks" the kernel does not (or cannot) influence. I think about
things like the time stamp counters found on many modern processors.
But:
- they are only found on modern processors, and therefore a generic
implementation isn't possible
- even if they are available, they might be useless if, as in the case
of the Alpha, the counter range is too small (just do the math: a 32 bit
counter increment in each clock cycle on machines with, as seen two weeks
ago, 1GHz clock speed).
What I meant to say is think about the implementation before you
propose something. It is certainly nice to have such a timer but it
is very often not possible to implement it and for exactly this reason
we have adjtime().
--
---------------. drepper at gnu.org ,-. 1325 Chesapeake Terrace
Ulrich Drepper \ ,-------------------' \ Sunnyvale, CA 94089 USA
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