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Tickless Linux Kernels

Linux now uses a tickless kernel by default. Before the advent of the tickless kernel, idle kernels woke themselves up (interrupted) at a rate of 100 Hz, 250 Hz or 1000 Hz, depending on how they were configured, to look for something to do. When interrupted, the kernel queried the CPU about the processes that it was executing, and used the results for process accounting and load balancing. This is known as the timer tick and the kernel performed this interrupt regardless of CPU power state. The practical result of this design meant that on systems implementing idle CPU power