ACTUAL KERNEL TICKS
Well the headline for this feature turned out to be quite nice, because it turns out the notion of ‘ticks’ are intrinsic to the kernel. Besides CPU clock speed, which you might think of as the heartbeat of your system (or more accurately one of a few heartbeats), the kernel has its own frequency. Most desktop distributions set this to 250Hz, which gives a reasonable trade-off between responsiveness and not wasting ticks on potentially idle instructions. It’s possible to run a so-called tickless system, which doesn’t really have no ticks (otherwise nothing would get done), but rather schedules the next tick in response to the next kernel event. “Dynamic ticks” would probably be a better name for this and the idea is similar to dynamic CPU frequencies.
For some tools, for example gaming and professional audio, it’s desirable to have a lower-than-average latency. And some distros (including Ubuntu) cater to these situations by providing a lowlatency kernel. Amongst other settings, this bumps the tick frequency to 1,000Hz and enables low-priority processes to be pre-empted by higher priority ones others, hopefully keeping the system responsive under load. A related idea is that of a real-time kernel.
But we’d like to squeeze into this box a nod to Drauger OS, an Ubuntu-based distro that aims to provide a premiere gaming experience. It does this with 1,000Hz ticks, the custom Xanmod kernel, bleeding-edge Mesa and Vulkan drivers, and much more. Do check it out at https://draugeros.org.