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.”
Link: KernelTrap.org
