12.2. Time Management

Time management covers multiple facets of time, timers and timestamping. While there is a time-of-day clock – often called wall clock - accessed by the C runtime system and via INtime structures, INtime also provides means of very fine-grained timestamping to measure execution times down to nanoseconds.

There also is a system timer supporting various granularities – typically in the range of microseconds - that can be synchronized with e.g., external sources like time stamps in Ethernet packets.

Timers allow threads to wait for specific amounts of time and to run periodically at predetermined intervals. Timer interrupts can be simulated using alarms.

All time related functions are driven by the hardware timer available in every INtime node.