Hey guys,

lately, I've seen a couple of questions about changing HZ in the kernel for
ix86. Your scheduler will run more often and your system might feel snappier
when increasing HZ, that's why we want it. Overhead for doing so got
relativlely low with recent CPUs, so me might really want it.

Basically, you can change it without causing any problems within the kernel.
However the HZ based value is reported by a system call sys_times() to the
userspace and as well from the proc fs.

So, this has to be fixed to have a seamless HZ change.

I created a patch which changes the values of HZ to 400 and fixed all places
I could spot which report the jiffies value to userspace. I think I caught
all of them. Note that 400 is a nice value, because we have to divide the
values by 4 then, which the gcc optimizes to shift operations, which can be
done in one or two cycles each and even parallelized on modern CPUs. Integer
divisions are slow on the ix86 (~20 cycles) and the sys_times() needs four of
them. You can easily change HZ to 500 and HZ_TO_STD to 5 in asm-i386/param.h, 
but then you would loose 80 CPU cycles per sys_times() syscall, which you
might want to avoid.

This patch works here since 2.1.125, so you can consider it well tested on
one system.

Have fun !
-- 
Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>                           [Dortmund, FRG]  
Plasma physics, high perf. computing              [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX]
PGP key on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/        [Linux SCSI driver: DC390]