Kernel Hardware Timestamps - Quant Developer Interview Question
Difficulty: Hard
Category: systems
Asked at: Jump Trading, Tower Research, Citadel Securities, Optiver, HRT
Topics: systems, networking, binary-parsing, low-latency
Problem Description
Precise latency tracking in high-frequency trading requires capturing hardware timestamps stamped directly by the Network Interface Card (NIC). This process involves parsing binary kernel control messages to extract specific timestamp structures, enabling accurate wire-to-application performance analysis.
Task
Implement a parser that extracts the raw hardware timestamp from a binary control message buffer. The function must iterate through cmsghdr structures, handle 64-bit memory alignment, and
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