On 1.7.2012 20:06, Dave Hart wrote:
The fact that some software assumes clocks move only in the normal direction is not news. People have tended to mention databases, but any software that accesses a clock or timestamps saved earlier from a clock may suffer the same fragility. Systems with good clock
That's true, unfortunately. It could be useful to move from using wallclock timestamps to something that is always monotonically increasing, such as OS uptime, when he actual wallclock time isn't really needed. I.e. cases where the ordering of events and the time spent between events is of interest, which includes a pretty large proportion of OS and general programming needs.
Of course uptime is reset to zero when a computer is rebooted, but this would neatly solve non-monotonous time problems for cases where continuity over reboots is not needed. Cases needing ordering over reboots could use a system where the monotonically increasing (system-specific) value is a combination of the number of times the OS has been booted and uptime since last reboot, for example.
Too bad there aren't that many standardized OS APIs to access uptime, much less OS boot count information... or are there?
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