ok, part of the mystery is solved and i'm just being an idiot: On Wed, 7 Jul 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > and this is also weird: > > (gdb) p loops_per_jiffy > $16 = 4096 > > huh? that value is way too low for this system. on my old 32-bit > system, that value would be around 2 million or so. in fact, that's exactly the right value based on this snippet from init/main.c: unsigned long loops_per_jiffy = (1<<12); which is, of course, 4096. but i still don't know why i can't print the changing value of jiffies if i clear the cache with: (gdb) core-file /proc/kcore rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ======================================================================== -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ