Re: [PATCH] i386: Selectable Frequency of the Timer Interrupt

Lee Revell
2005-07-13T16:50:07Z

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 11:59 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > The real answer here is for the tickless patches to cleaned up to the
> > point where they can be merged, and then we won't waste battery power
> > entering the timer interrupt in the first place. :-)
>
> And that does seem to be the long term solution. Most (not all) modern
> hardware has a readable timer as accurate as the tick, so doing a timer
> to clock conversion as needed would be possible.
>
> Unfortunately the interest in tickless operation seems to be mostly in
> the power saving possibilities of laptops. If you could make it part of
> some really sexy high interest area, like real time premption, it might
> get done sooner ;-)
>

Actually, there is quite a bit of interest already in the same circles
that are using RT preempt. "How do I get a timer with better than 1ms
resolution" is an FAQ on linux-audio-dev, and once you have dynamic tick
the next logical step is high res timers.

Currently we refer these users to George's site. I suspect the only
reason there has not been more interest is that not many users are up to
integrating the HRT and the RT preempt patch.

Lee