"Christopher Friesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Has anyone ever considered including a microsecond-precision
> monotonically-increasing counter in the kernel? This would allow for
> easy timing of alarms and such by using absolute values of when the
> alarm should expire rather than a list of deltas from previous alarms.
>
> The thing I have in mind would store a value something like "xtime"
> (maybe call it "ytime"?) in the kernel. This value would be initialized
> to zero on startup, and would be incremented at the same time as
> "xtime". However, while "xtime" reflects adjustments to the actual
> system time (settimeofday(), date, ntp, etc.), this value would not.
> Finally, it would be accessed with a system call essentially identical
> to sys_gettimeofday(), only it would access "ytime" instead of "xtime"
> before going down and getting the microseconds from the RTC.
>
> This doesn't seem to me as though it would be all that tricky to add,
> and I could see it being very useful in providing a timing source that
> is guaranteed to
> a) be accurate to microseconds and
> b) never go backwards.
Why a new system call?
regarding a: it could have microsecond resolution but not
microseconds accuracy.
regarding b: have you looked at the return-value of times(2)
Or roll your own using setitimer(2)
--
Manfred
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