The internal accounting uses 'timespec' based time stamps, which is
slightly inefficient and also problematic once we get to the time_t
overflow in 2038.
When communicating to the firmware, we even get an open-coded 64-bit
division that prevents the code from being build-tested on 32-bit
architectures and is inefficient due to the double conversion from
64-bit nanoseconds to seconds+nanoseconds and then microseconds.