Re: A nit-pick on gettime(9) man-page

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 05:10:38PM +0800, Paul Goyette wrote:
> 
> 	The system realtime clock is guaranteed to be monotonically
> 	increasing at all times.  As such, all calls to these functions
> 	are guaranteed to return a system time greater than or equal to
> 	the system time returned in any previous calls.
> 
> 
> The guarantee to return a result "greater than or equal to" the previous
> result is a property of a "monotonically non-decreasing" function.  A
> "monotonically increasing" function would guarantee a results that is
> strictly greater than any previous results.

It is strictly non-decreasing, but the expectation is that the result
will actually change over time. On a short enough observation interval,
it might be constant though. Time counters are a step function and e.g.
the Intel RTC has a frequency of ~32kHz, so even on slower CPUs it is
easy to observe the constant phases.

Joerg