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Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 13:45:57 -0700 (MST)
From: Charles Mott <cmott@srv.net>
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Subject: Re: gettimeofday() overhead 
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On Wed, 5 Nov 1997, Tony Overfield wrote:
> >On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Mike Smith wrote:
> >
> >Unfortunately, this requires access to /dev/kmem, and thus your process 
> >must be running as root.  IMHO this isn't really an acceptable tradeoff 
> >unless the application already requires it.
> 
> What about a /dev/timeofday device that allowed you to read-only map 
> only the appropriate clock bits (or equiv.)?
> 

This sounds like a good idea.  Quite a few programs
need event-based timestamps, and if gettimeofday()
in the standard library could access /dev/timeofday
without a user-kernel context switch, this would seem
to be a performance enhancement to the system.

Charles Mott