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Re:Let’s Stop the Unix Time Insanity by brianpgordon on Monday December 02, 2013 @06:43PM (#6837455)
What exactly is the call to action here? For kernel developers to change how time works, and probably break thousands of drivers and applications, based on a blog post?
Re:Let’s Stop the Unix Time Insanity by Udo on Monday December 02, 2013 @06:54PM (#6837508)
No, willful misunderstanding aside, the idea is to provide a single continuous counter to apps that want it. If you look closely at most implementations, that's how many apps actually expect it to work.
Re:Let’s Stop the Unix Time Insanity by jonhohle on Monday December 02, 2013 @07:12PM (#6837596)
There already is a continuous monotonic timer available in most operating systems, it just happens to be relative to some internal counter local to that system (and depending on virtualization layer doesn't always provide monotonic guarantees). This value can generally be translated into a fixed (and vice-versa), serialized timestamp for persistence.
Re:Let’s Stop the Unix Time Insanity by AndrewBissell on Monday December 02, 2013 @07:44PM (#6837734)
I think that's mainly a problem with apps using a wall clock time (e.g. System.currentTimeMillis() in Java) when what they really want is a monotonic clock based on a hardware counter of some kind (like System.nanoTime()).

I'm not too familiar with what the clock situation is like for languages outside C/C++/Java.