64bit timestamp

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Sun Mar 25 21:58:07 UTC 2007


On 2007-03-25 22:16, deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:
>Oliver Fromme wrote:
>> Ideally, two consecutive, non-parallel operations should give
>> two different timestamps.  That applies to creating or
>> touching a file or other kind of resource, or even just
>> calling the gettimeofday() function from within the same
>> thread, or whatever.  In reality that isn't the case today for
>> FreeBSD for other reasons, but the timestamp accuracy of UFS2
>> would certainly be sufficient for that.
> 
> Actually, my intend wasn't to use it in filesystems, but
> server-client apps, such as games, where 32bit integer timers
> must be restarted every 3 weeks

That's a bug in the applications themselves.  The gettimeofday()
call in any modern UNIX returns a `struct timeval', which
contains *both* a time_t value of the current time with
second-level accuracy and a tv_usec member with millisecond
accuracy (or at least an approximation of a timestamp with
millisecond accuracy).

Any userlevel application which uses userlevel time counters and
requires a restart every two or three weeks, because these
userlevel timecounters have rolled back to zero, is broken and
should be fixed.



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