On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Andi Kleen wrote:

That is because of the lock it takes. Locks are always slow.

xtime_lock?

Older kernels used gettimeoffset which ran without lock, but that was
changed because in some very obscure cases it could cause non monotonous
timestamps when the user turns on timestamp receiving to user space
(kernel protocols do not care)

Possibilities:

- Ignore the problem and switch back to gettimeoffset again

Is it safe to call gettimeoffset without the lock?

- Switch to gettimeoffset but add some correction step for the unlikely
case that someone wants the timestamp from user space
(would be my prefered solution)
- Implement lockless gettimeofday like x86-64 or sparc
(good one too, but likely slower than last)

ia64 seems to also have the lock.

cheers,
jamal