prevent the compiler from optimizing assignments into byte-copy
operations which might make access to the individual fields non-atomic.
Use the individual fields throughout, and don't bother locking them with
Giant: it is no longer needed.
Inspired by: tjr
a set of helper routines to deal with real-time clocks. The generic
functions access the clock diver using a kobj interface. This is intended
to reduce code reduplication and make it easy to support more than one
clock model on a single architecture.
This code is currently only used on sparc64, but it is planned to convert
the code of the other architectures to it later.
