The Ticking Beast: a Deep Dive Into Timers, Timekeeping, Tick and Tickless Kernels

Recorded February 22, 2024

View an interactive, complimentary Mentorship Session exploring The Ticking Beast: a Deep Dive Into Timers, Timekeeping, Tick and Tickless Kernels with Joel Fernandes, Staff Software Engineer, Google

The Timekeeping subsystem and Timers subsystem are critical components of the Linux kernel. Its proper functioning is required for a number of critical subsystems including the Scheduler and Ftrace. This talk gives the audience a tour of the internals of these systems and the challenges that modern requirements such as power efficiency, speed of accessing a clock and dealing with clock drift present. We also go over how CPU idle affects the tick, how CPU idle affects timers, and the concept of broadcast timers.