[bradfa]

The embedded Linux system I'm working on right now takes about 17 us per stat() call due to this but time will always be kept internally as UTC, so taking advantage of this is worth considering for me.

Since most embedded systems can directly translate the amount of processing needed to achieve the product goal into a real dollar cost of the hardware, any savings, even a small one, is worth investigating. Since the hardware and system are generally well understood, implementing something like this is much more reasonable.

But I agree, on a general purpose OS doing general purpose thing, an optimization like what's proposed by the article may not be worth the other tradeoffs.