Re: gettimeofday() jumping into the future

Avi Kivity
2007-08-23T13:03:51Z

Gerald Britton wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 01:08:27PM +0200, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We've been seeing some strange behaviour on some of our applications
>> recently. I've tracked this down to gettimeofday() returning spurious
>> values occasionally.
>>
>> Specifically, gettimeofday() will suddenly, for a single call, return
>> a value about 4398 seconds (~1 hour 13 minutes) in the future. The
>> following call goes back to a normal value.
>>
>
> I have seen this as well (on a 2.6.20.4 kernel). The value returned was
> always identical each time the glitch occured (just a little over 4398
> seconds). I saw it watching packet receive timestamps and on the system in
> question, it would generally hit this problem around once a minute. When
> moving forward to a 2.6.21 kernel, the problem seemed to go away (also back
> to 2.6.17, unfortunately I didn't have any sample points inbetween).
> I didn't have free time to spend bisecting attempting to find when the
> behavior started or stopped.
>
>

That value, in nanoseconds, is 0x3fffd3a4c00. The next second is
0x40038d51600. Is the wraparound at (0x400 << 32) significant?

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error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function