General-Purpose Timing : The Failure of Periodic Timers

All general-purpose commodity operating systems use periodic clock interrupts to regain control and measure the passage of time. This is ill-suited for desktop settings, as the fine-grained timing requirements of modern multimedia applications require a high clock rate, which may suffer from significant overhead. It is ill-suited for HPC environments, as asynchronous interrupts ruin the coordination among cluster nodes. And it is ill-suited for mobile platforms, as it wastes significant energy, especially when the system is otherwise idle. To be truly general-purpose, systems should therefore switch to a mechanism that is closer to one-shot timers (set only for specific needs) while avoiding the potentially huge overhead they entail. With a careful design it is possible to achieve both high accuracy and low overhead, thus significantly extending the applicability of general-purpose operating systems.