High-resolution timers

[Paul Rubin]

Bryan <bryan at eevolved.com> writes:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am searching for a platform-agnostic high resolution timer module to use 
> in various entropy collection schemes for cryptographic purposes. The 
> standard time module is great on my system ( i686 linux ) :

The highest resolution timer on a 686 is the Pentium performance counter,
a 64-bit counter that's incremented with every CPU clock tick.  See

  Message-ID: <3C374978.5C40DD73 at zetnet.co.uk>
  Subject: Code to read Pentium time stamp counter (was: Help with algorithm 
     processing speed)
  From: David Hopwood <david.hopwood at zetnet.co.uk>
  Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:44:08 +0000

from sci.crypt a few weeks ago for some C code that reads the counter
on Linux and win32.