psutil.boot_time() ... doesn't ?

[R.Wieser]

Dennis,

> Depends upon the OS...

My apologies, its Linux (as on a Raspberry Pi).

> You can easily look at the code used by psutil

:-) I somehow assumed that those where build-in into the language itself. 
I'll have to take a peek at what else is available there too.

> I read somewhere that the kernel calculates the btime from the
> current gettimeofday minus the jiffies since boot converted to
> seconds.

That was also my guess to what happened.

> last file system modification time
> hardware RTC (if equipped)
> NTP update (if networked)
> what should your "boot time" be referenced against?

The built-in clock ofcourse. :-)   But I would not mind if it would be set 
to some believable time by the fake-hwclock.

But granted, on a Raspberry thats a bit of a problem.   On the other hand, 
just dragging the "last boot time" around by whatever time you now set feels 
like fakery.

Oh man, I can already imagine a CSI plot where someone tries to use as linux 
machines boot time as an alibi, but summer time just arrived, causing it to 
appear an hour later .. :-)

> but that boot time will depend on exactly when the CRON job ran
> in relation to the three potential sources of clock time.

I was already thinking of something similar (running a script at boot), but 
also saw such race-time problems.
I might edit the fake-hwclock code though.   Copying the clocks current 
date/time after it has just been set (or not, when an RTC is installed) 
would be enough for my purposes.

... Though I would rather not mess around in/with system files.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser