Reducing the power consumption of clocks and timers

Updated: October 28, 2024

If your system needs to manage power consumption, you can set up your timers to help the system to sleep for longer intervals, saving power.

The kernel can reduce power consumption by running in tickless mode. This is a bit of a misnomer: the system still has clock ticks, and everything runs as normal unless the system is idle. Only when the system goes completely idle does the kernel “turn off” clock ticks, and in reality what it does is slow down the clock so that the next tick interrupt occurs just after the next active timer is to fire.

In order for the kernel to enter tickless mode, the following must all be true:

If the kernel decides to enter tickless mode, it determines the number of nanoseconds until the next timer is supposed to expire. If that expiry is more than a certain time away, the kernel reprograms the timer hardware to generate its next interrupt shortly after that, and then sets some variables to indicate that it's gone tickless. When something other than the idle thread is made ready, the kernel stops tickless operation, checks the list of active timers, and fires off any that were supposed to expire before it went to sleep.

Here are some tips for helping the kernel reduce power consumption: