The main advantage of using a real timestamp instead of a generation
counter is that we would be compatible to Unixware/Solaris/... Their
API is fine, so I see no advantage in inventing a new incompatible one.
Another advantage of using the real time instead of a counter is that
you can easily merge the both values into a single 64bit value and do
arithmetic on it in user space. With a generation counter you would need
to work with number pairs, which is much more complex.
[or alternatively reset the generation counter every second in the kernel
to get a flat time range again,
which would be racy and ugly and complicated in the kernel because it
would need additional timestamps]
Also a rdtsc/get_timestamp or in the worst case a jiffie read is really
not complex to code in kernel, what makes you think it is?
-Andi
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