On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 05:52:42PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> On Sat, 28 Apr 2001, Andi Kleen wrote:
>
> > You can also just use the cycle counter directly in most modern CPUs.
> > It can be read with a single instruction. In fact modern glibc will do
> > it for you when you use clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, ...)
>
> well, it's not reliable while using things like APM, so i'd not recommend
> to depend on it too much.
*If* you use APM on your server boxes. Not likely even when it doesn't have more than one CPU
and it can be checked at runtime.
I guess glibc could also regularly (every 10 calls or so) call regular gettimeofday
to recheck synchronization; at least for a web server that potential inaccuracy would
be acceptable ("best effort") and the cost of the system call is 1/10.
In x86-64 there are special vsyscalls btw to solve this problem that export
a lockless kernel gettimeofday()
-Andi
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 30 2001 - 21:00:21 EST