Needed faster implementation of do_gettimeofday()

[puneet_kaushik@persistent.co.in]

Hello all,

I am running oprofile on some program. Following is the oprofile output.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Counted GLOBAL_POWER_EVENTS events (time during which processor is not
stopped) with a unit mask of 0x01 (mandatory) count 100000
samples  %        app name                 symbol name
985913    8.6083  vmlinux                  mark_offset_tsc
584473    5.1032  libc-2.3.2.so            getc
295901    2.5836  vmlinux                  ide_outb
270823    2.3646  vmlinux                  _spin_lock
249791    2.1810  vmlinux                  _spin_unlock
236140    2.0618  vmlinux                  timer_interrupt
175249    1.5302  ld-2.3.2.so              do_lookup_versioned
140429    1.2261  sendmail                 putc
138739    1.2114  sendmail                 stabhash
134145    1.1713  sendmail                 getc

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


>From this output what I can analyse is that mark_offset_tsc(which is
called from do_gettimeofday), and some other timer functions, are taking
most of the CPU.

Is there any faster implementation of do_gettimeofday. I am using kernel
2.6.10. with dual P4.

What I found from google search is: http://lwn.net/Articles/9266/ , which
is only for kernel 2.4

Thanks for help.


-Puneet