Tickless kernel

A tickless kernel is an operating system kernel in which timer interrupts do not occur at regular intervals, but are only delivered as required.
The Linux kernel on s390 from 2.6.6 and on i386 from release 2.6.21 can be configured to turn the timer tick off ("tickless" or "dynamic tick") for idle CPUs using codice_1, and from 3.10 with codice_2 extended for non-idle processors with codice_3. The XNU kernel in Mac OS X 10.4 on, and the NT kernel in Windows 8 on, are also tickless. The Solaris 8 kernel introduced the cyclic subsystem which allows arbitrary resolution timers and tickless operation. FreeBSD 9 introduced a "dynamic tick mode" (aka tickless).
As of 2020, there is a plan to add this to MINIX 3 in the medium term.