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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