On Iau, 2003-06-05 at 01:12, Ralf Baechle wrote: > You loose. The reasons why SGI did construct their systems that way are > still valid. It can be quite tricky to distribute the clock in large > systems - even for a moderate definition of large. And for ccNUMAs which > are going to show up on the embedded market sooner or later it's easy > for the lazy designer to use several clock sources anyway. Note our > current time code for will not work properly if clocks diverge on the > slightest bit - among other things the standards mandate time to > monotonically increase. Actually the standards are suprisingly lax. I had the same assumptions but people who went and read the spec in detail found Posix is a lot more relaxed (except about CLOCK_MONOTONIC). What seems to be happening in the PC and Sparc worlds is vendors are running a seperate lower accuracy global clock source (eg the HPET on AMD64)
