Getting "absolute time" in Linux - comp.os.linux.development.system

Message from discussion Getting "absolute time" in Linux
Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!news.tele.dk!feed118.news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!lnewsinpeer00.lnd.ops.eu.uu.net!bnewsinpeer00.bru.ops.eu.uu.net!emea.uu.net!uunet!spool.news.uu.net!ash.uu.net!news.fore.com!not-for-mail
From: Boris Benenson <boris.benen...@marconi.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Getting "absolute time" in Linux
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:30:57 -0500
Organization: Marconi
Lines: 5
Message-ID: <ejd3ob$5c1$1@newsfeed.pit.comms.marconi.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 169.144.133.53
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Trace: newsfeed.pit.comms.marconi.com 1163530827 5505 169.144.133.53 (14 Nov 2006 19:00:27 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: usenet@fore.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: 14 Nov 2006 19:00:27 GMT
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 (Windows/20061025)

Is there a way in either standard or Real-time Linux to get "absolute 
number of ticks (or seconds) since the Epoc (or some other configurable 
starting point), regardless of the kernel clock resets via 
settimeofday() and the RTC resets via hwclock set and regardless of the 
system reboots?