Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, george anzinger wrote:
>
>>This patch, in conjunction with the "core" high-res-timers
>>patch implements high resolution timers on the i386
>>platforms.
>
>
> I really don't get the notion of partial ticks, and quite frankly, this
> isn't going into my tree until some major distribution kicks me in the
> head and explains to me why the hell we have partial ticks instead of just
> making the ticks shorter.
>
> Linus
In any kind of virtual environment you would rather prefer a completely
tickless system alltogether than increased tick rates. In a S/390
virtual machine, running many hundreds of virtual Linux servers the
100Hz timer pops are already considerably painful, and going to a higher
tick rate achieving higher timer resolution is completely prohibitive.
Similar is true in many embedded systems related to power consumption of
high frequency ticks.
However, George has shown that introducing the notion of a completely
tickless system is expensive on Intel overhead wise, thus partial ticks
seem to be a possibility addressing the needs for embedded and virtual
environments, getting decent timer resolution as needed.
Ingo Adlung
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 15 2002 - 22:00:46 EST