Reference Time Counter

The hypervisor maintains a per-partition reference time counter. Successive accesses to the reference time counter return strictly monotonically increasing time values as determined by any and all virtual processors of a partition. Furthermore, the reference time counter is rate constant and unaffected by processor or bus-speed transitions or deep power-savings states. A partition's reference time counter is initialized to zero when the partition is created. The reference time counter for all partitions count at the same rate. However, at any time, the absolute value of each reference time counter will typically differ because partitions will have different creation times.

The reference time counter continues to count up as long as at least one virtual processor is not explicitly suspended.

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Build date: 11/16/2013