- Don't print out meaningless iCOMP numbers, those are for droids.
- Use a shorter wait to determine clock rate to avoid deficiencies
in DELAY().
- Use a fixed-point representation with 8 bits of fraction to store
the rate and rationalize the variable name. It would be
possible to use even more fraction if it turns out to be
worthwhile (I rather doubt it).
The question of source code arrangement remains unaddressed.
free-run and doing a subtract in microtime() rather than resetting the
counter to zero at every clock tick. In combination with the changes to
kern_clock.c, this should eliminate all the immediately obvious sources
of systematic jitter in timekeeping on Pentium machines.
This code is mostly taken from the 1.1 port (which was in turn taken from
Dave Mills's kern.tar.Z example). A few significant differences:
1) ntp_gettime() is now a MIB variable rather than a system call. A few
fiddles are done in libc to make it behave the same.
2) mono_time does not participate in the PLL adjustments.
3) A new interface has been defined (in <machine/clock.h>) for doing
possibly machine-dependent things around the time of the clock update.
This is used in Pentium kernels to disable interrupts, set `time', and
reset the CPU cycle counter as quickly as possible to avoid jitter in
microtime(). Measurements show an apparent resolution of a bit more than
8.14usec, which is reasonable given system-call overhead.
