KernelTrap: High-Res Timers and Tickless Kernel

“Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar posted an update of their
high-res timers kernel patches for the 2.6.17 kernel, ‘upon which
we based a tickless kernel (dyntick) implementation and a ‘dynamic
HZ’ feature as well.’ The patch currently works for x86, with ports
to x86_64, PPC and ARM in the works. Thomas explains, ‘the high-res
timers feature (CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS) enables POSIX timers and
nanosleep() to be as accurate as the hardware allows (around 1usec
on typical hardware). This feature is transparent–if enabled it
just makes these timers much more accurate than the current HZ
resolution…'”

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