(Author here). It would be interesting to test the performance difference. I downloaded the source of one of my distro-provided kernels & recompiled it with dif

(Author here). It would be interesting to test the performance difference. I downloaded the source of one of my distro-provided kernels & recompiled it with different config setting (to compare perf with just one thing changed), but got into some trouble with my drivers and ran out of time. I would say that on your laptop, you probably wouldn't even notice a difference (as the "rdtsc" timestamp reading operations are pretty efficient & done entirely within a CPU). But with anything that can interact with external hardware million(s) of times per second (heavy SSD I/O in servers and moving large amounts of data over network), may see a minor (but measurable) hit. In my experience, when large amounts of CPU gets used by interrupt routines (either hardware or software interrupts), that more likely indicates some bug or configuration issue in a device driver or even some faulty hardware issue. edit: so, running "dmesg" and checking hardware health metrics (mceloc, EDAC) is a reasonable thing to do when interrupt storms & related CPU usage suddenly show up.