Linux System Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Time

Time serves various purposes in a modern operating system, and many programs need to keep track of it. The kernel measures the passage of time in three different ways:

Wall time (or real time)

This is the actual time and date in the real world—that is, the time as one would read it on a clock on the wall. Processes use the wall time when interfacing with the user or timestamping an event.

Process time

This is the time that a process spends executing on a processor. It can be a measurement of the time the process itself spent executing (user time) or the time the kernel spent working on the process’s behalf (system time). Processes care about process time for profiling, auditing, and statistical purposes, for example, measuring how much processor time a given algorithm took to complete. Wall time is misleading for such uses because, given the multitasking nature of Linux, wall time is generally greater than process time. Conversely, given multiple processors and a threaded process, the process time can actually exceed the wall time for a given operation!

Monotonic time

This time source is strictly linearly increasing. Most operating systems, Linux included, use the system’s uptime (time since boot) for this purpose. The wall time can change—for example, because the user may set it or because the system continually adjusts the time to combat clock skew—and additional imprecision can be introduced through, say, leap seconds. The system uptime, on the other hand, ...