Re: [patch] fastcall-2.3.32-B6, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT support

Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
14 Dec 1999 13:53:54 -0800


Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:

> This is not that uncommon - there's a LOT of programs that care deeply
> about wall-clock time. You'll find a few games avoid system calls like
> the plague, but still call gettimeofday() because it's _really_
> important to know how time progresses..

It's important for internal profiling and logging, too. INN, which
constantly profiles itself automatically as it runs, calls gettimeofday()
around 800 times a second on my main transit news server. Hm. That could
stand to be looked at, as that's rather high, but on the other hand to get
the profiling data that we want there aren't that many good alternatives.

Solaris also implements gettimeofday() as a special hand-coded system call
with considerably lighter setup.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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