Fast clocks on slow hardware

Posted Jun 24, 2005 2:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Fast clocks on slow hardware by larryr
Parent article: What to merge for 2.6.13?

In fact, the only time I've ever heard anyone complain about the clock tick overhead is on systems where lots of Linux systems share the same CPU and are designed for most of those Linux systems to be idle most the time (the clock ticks even on an idle system).

In this case, I'd bet money the myriad differences in the kernel between 2.4 and 2.6 all taken together have nothing to do with the slowdown. A whole lot of other software has changed here too.

Remember that when CPUs were about 1000 times slower than this 200 MHz thing, Unix systems were already performing reasonably at 100 Hz. So processing 10 times as many ticks ought to be OK.