Nice article. I hope this is not true: "Embedded systems often need to poll hardware or do other tasks on a fixed schedule. POSIX timers make it easy to arrange any task to get scheduled periodically. The clock that the timer uses can be set to tick at a rate a fine as one kilohertz, so that software engineers can control the scheduling of tasks with precision." The promise of the high-res timer patch was usec resolution, not msec. This would be a great loss. Does anybody know any more? --p