Wednesday, September 17, 2014

[cakcqqbi] Local CPU time

Provide a system utility which returns a triple: Number of clock cycles since the computer was last rebooted. Number of reboots (stored in non-volatile memory).  User-settable epoch (number of times the reboot counter has been reset or replaced).

The goal is to have a mechanism of time which is more likely to always go forward, unlike the system clock, which may be accidentally made to go backward (or deliberately to correct accidentally going too far forward).  The important feature is that time always goes forwards, not that intervals be accurate.

The motivation was for filesystem timestamps.  Perhaps better would be a filesystem which automatically keeps track of always increasing transaction numbers.

Keep a log lining up this local time with system clock.

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