It’s bad planning because 64-bit time stamps were supposed to provide coverage for “22 times the expected lifetime of the universe”, but by being the only OS to use those 64 bits to count nanoseconds, they only bought a couple more bits over 32-bit timestamps. What they could have done differently is not used nanoseconds for the epoch counter. Milliseconds seem like they would have offered the perfect balance.
Comments
Why is it bad planning? I can’t think of a better alternate plan.
It’s bad planning because 64-bit time stamps were supposed to provide coverage for “22 times the expected lifetime of the universe”, but by being the only OS to use those 64 bits to count nanoseconds, they only bought a couple more bits over 32-bit timestamps. What they could have done differently is not used nanoseconds for the epoch counter. Milliseconds seem like they would have offered the perfect balance.
Windows uses 100 nanosecond resolution for NTFS time stamps.