dmesg question

[Brian McKee]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Evuraan::?= =?UTF-8?Q?=E0=B4=8F=E0=B4=B5=E0=B5=82=E0=B4=B0?=
> =?UTF-8?Q?=E0=B4=BE=E0=B4=A8=E0=B5=8D=E2=80=8D_?= wrote:
>
> (some pretty odd encoding, there...)

Looks fine in Gmail - kinda cool cursive script that I'm guessing is
right to left...

>
>> What does the 1st field in dmesg output or (/var/log/dmesg) tell?
>>
>> $ dmesg|awk {'print $1'} | tail -5
>> [21703.032000]
>> [21703.044000]
>> [21703.048000]
>> [21703.048000]
>> [21703.060000]
>
> It's a timestamp, though I can't say how it is to be interpreted.

I wondered myself about that - I did some googling and all I came up
with was this post
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-828673.html that says it's
seconds since boot to 6 decimal places but doesn't have any links to
backing material.  And, his own message seems to indicate there's more
to it than that.  If anybody has more info I'd be interested too.

Brian