Retargeting newlib for c++ chrono

I am using arm-none-eabi toolchain with newlib to target a custom board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ (specifically the MCU-on-eclipse version of the toolchain). I am compiling/linking with -nostartfiles and --specs=nano.specs and have re-targeted stdout and stderr to USB and a serial port respectively. I have created implementations for most of the C system calls.

I am using the chrono library with two custom clock, the now() functions get RTC time or my systick timer. It seems like this mirrors the purpose of the standard steady_clock and system_clock and so I though I could try using them.

to do so I had to implement the gettimeofday syscall which I did

// returning a set time of one second just for testing
int _gettimeofday(struct timeval* tv, void* tz) {
    tv->tv_sec  = 1;
    tv->tv_usec = 255;
    return 0;
}

my main code is as follows:

int main(void)
{
    HWInit();

    static std::chrono::steady_clock::time_point t1 = std::chrono::steady_clock::now();
    static std::chrono::system_clock::time_point t2 = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
    int64_t count1 = t1.time_since_epoch().count();
    int64_t count2 = t2.time_since_epoch().count();

    printf("Time 1: %lld\n Time 2: %lld\n", count1, count2);
    for(;;){}
    return 0;
}

using the debugger I can see that both steady_clock::now() and sysytem_clock::now() call my _gettimeofday() function and both end up with the exact same time-point.

of course if I try to do the following I get multiple definition errors:

using SysClock = std::chrono::system_clock;

SysClock::time_point SysClock::now() noexcept {
    return SysClock::time_point( SysClock::duration(1983) );
}

So can I somehow overload the now() functions of the standard chrono clocks? or maybe the entire clock implementation with my own duration and rep typedefs that match the hardware better? I can overload new and delete for my embedded system (and should), so doing this for chrono would also be nice.

Solution

From gccs libstdc++ chrono.cc:

system_clock::now() uses gettimeofday(&tv, 0); or clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &tp); or syscall. If gettimeofday works for you, that means it uses it.
steady_clock::now() uses clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &tp);. So you should overload clock_gettime and handle CLOCK_MONOTONIC argument.
There is no _clock_gettime_r function provided by newlib, as one in _gettimeofday_t that passes newlib's struct reent around. If you want to handle multithreading within newlib, it's good to write your own similar wrapper that handles _reent->errno value. But the bet would be to overload _gettimeofday_r function as you aim only at newlib.