Re: gettimeofday() jumping into the future

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Aug 23 2007 - 09:03:51 EST


Gerald Britton wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 01:08:27PM +0200, Michael Smith wrote:
Hi,

We've been seeing some strange behaviour on some of our applications
recently. I've tracked this down to gettimeofday() returning spurious
values occasionally.

Specifically, gettimeofday() will suddenly, for a single call, return
a value about 4398 seconds (~1 hour 13 minutes) in the future. The
following call goes back to a normal value.

I have seen this as well (on a 2.6.20.4 kernel). The value returned was
always identical each time the glitch occured (just a little over 4398
seconds). I saw it watching packet receive timestamps and on the system in
question, it would generally hit this problem around once a minute. When
moving forward to a 2.6.21 kernel, the problem seemed to go away (also back
to 2.6.17, unfortunately I didn't have any sample points inbetween).
I didn't have free time to spend bisecting attempting to find when the
behavior started or stopped.


That value, in nanoseconds, is 0x3fffd3a4c00. The next second is 0x40038d51600. Is the wraparound at (0x400 << 32) significant?

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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