Re: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage.

Ely Wilson (plexus@ionet.net)
Sun, 25 Oct 1998 18:30:46 -0700 (MST)


... snip /proc discussion referring to uptime contents ...

LT>the accuracy arbitrary. It's printed out in a format that is meant to be
LT>scannable by "%f", so if you want to make it contain a few hundred
LT>significant digits then you could..

I agree, this is a sane method to implement accuracy. However, the value in
uptime has a decimal precision of 2 digits, which is only 1
one-hundreth of a second. Hmm, a nanosecond is 1 one-billionth of a second..
which equates to 10-9, or a fp precision of 8 digits (not 2).

LT>
LT>Always having microsecond resolution is a bad idea. Because something is
LT>bound to come along that wants nanoseconds. So if you just basically say
LT>that any fractional amount should always be printed out as a floating
LT>point number, then you're fine.
LT>

Of course, even a fp precision of 2 is more than enough for /proc/uptime,
something that probably doesn't *really* matter beyond the nearest second
anyway (or is there soemthing out there that actually uses the fractional
part? I'm interested in seeing it.. )

----------------------------------------------------------
---- ely --- Software/System Engineer ------
------------ <plexus@ionet.net> ------
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