New KVM and HPET is available

I have noticed some of the later KVM instances support HPET which is more accurate than kvm-clock and TSC. They are not enabled by default. For example, Linode VPS servers in the $5 range have HPET (they are also doing a free three month trial with $100 so go setup a server)

To find out if you have a high precision event timer available:

cat /sys/bus/clocksource/devices/clocksource0/available_clocksource

You can enable HPET by the following:

echo hpet > /sys/bus/clocksource/devices/clocksource0/current_clocksource

Be sure to put it somewhere that starts on boot. If you use systemd you can add a .service entry for it or for rc.local

Noel

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