uptime Was: Re: Looking for speaker for gnu autoconf/automake

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

rir wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 r> By the tone of your responses, I guess that you both don't 
 r> think any app's are counting on this counter being consistant.

Uptime is actually tied to the jiffy counter, which is in the kernel and is
used for a lot of mysterious stuff.  Anything which implicates a random number
generator could potentially affected, especially if you are relying on that
generator to be of cryptographic quality.  Some protocols, such as NFS, make
critical use of short time measurements, as do some security protocols such as
Kerberos.

I don't really know exactly what would break, but, since it's your machine, you
would own the pieces.
 
-- Mike


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