Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, x86 based versions of , Linux operating systems using the 2.6 kernel (or later), FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. The Linux kernel can also use HPET as its clock source. The documentation of Red Hat MRG version 2 states that TSC is the preferred clock source due to its much lower overhead, but it uses HPET as a fallback. A benchmark in that environment for 10 million event counts found that TSC took about 0.6 seconds, HPET took slightly over 12 seconds, and ACPI Power Management Timer took around 24 seconds. In 2019 it was decided to blacklist HPET in newer Linux kernels when running on some Intel CPUs (Coffee Lake) because of its instability. Problems HPET is a continuously running timer that counts upward, not a one-shot device that counts down to zero, causes one interrupt and then stops. Since HPET compares the actual timer value and the programmed target value on equality rather than "greater or equal", interrupts can be missed if the target time has already passed when the comparator value is written into the chip's register. In such a case, not only is the intended interrupt missed, but actually set far into the future (about 232 or 264 counts). In the presence of non-maskable interrupts (such as a System Management Interrupt (SMI)) that do not have a hard upper bound on their execution time, this race condition requires time-consuming re-checks of the timer after setup and is hard to avoid completely. The difficulties are exacerbated if the comparator value is not synchronized with the timer immediately, but delayed by one or two ticks, as some chipsets do. Besides mentioning the race condition discussed above, a VMware document also lists some other drawbacks: "The specification does not require the timer to be particularly fine grained, to have low drift, or to be fast to read. Some typical implementations run the counter at about 18 MHz and require about the same amount of time (1–2 μs) to read the HPET as with the ACPI timer. Implementations have been observed in which the period register is off by 800 parts per million or more." Notes References Integrated circuits