Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Computer time measurements (Was Re: 64 bits for times....)
Message-ID: <1990Aug23.162823.350@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <26012@bellcore.bellcore.com> <11187@alice.UUCP> <AGLEW.90Aug21220304@dwarfs.crhc.uiuc.edu> <1990Aug22.044826.18572@portia.Stanford.EDU> <MEISSNER.90Aug22114425@osf.osf.org>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 90 16:28:23 GMT

In article <MEISSNER.90Aug22114425@osf.osf.org> meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>... A second is fairly long these days with the faster
>processors, and things like make are forced to use second
>granualarity.  Unfortunately, the POSIX committee doesn't agree with
>me, and outlawed extra fields in the stat/utime structures.

My understanding was that only the utime structure is specifically
forbidden to have extras, and for it there wasn't much choice:  since
it is fed to the kernel, not obtained from it, there is an unsolvable
problem of how you (portably!) fill in mysterious non-standard extra
fields so that the kernel won't see garbage in them.
-- 
Committees do harm merely by existing. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                       -Freeman Dyson  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
