I am constrained to using version 2.4.18 of the kernel because I am using a port of BSD divert sockets found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipdivert/ . I had to patch the kernel for support, and the last patch was for version 2.4.18.

I need to have a faster timer interrupts than 10ms so I changed the HZ variable in /include/asm/param.h from 100 to 1000. I recompiled the kernel, Now I have a timer interrupts of 1ms which dramatically improves the performance of the select() system call, which is what I want.

I know that in the 2.6 kernel HZ is 1000 by default, but i cant use it. Seeing that I am changing the HZ value what effects does this have on the system besides the increased interrupt overhead?

I have also seen that in this patch everything in jiffies is converted to clock_t. Why is this?

Can the patch variable-hz-rml-2.4.20-pre10-ac2-1.patch apply to kernel2.4.18? I found the same patch in wolks patchset for kernel 2.4.18 as 316_variable-HZ.patch