HPET multimedia timer

[koffiejunkie <koffiejunkielistlurker@koffiejunkie.za.net>]

Hi guys,

I've been fiddling with powertop on my notebook, and one of  the 
suggestions it makes is:

"enable the HPET (Multimedia Timer) in your BIOS or add the kernel patch 
to force-enable HPET.  HPET support allows Linux to have much longer 
sleep intervals."

I checked that the kernel has HPET support built in:

CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET=y
# CONFIG_HPET_RTC_IRQ is not set
CONFIG_HPET_MMAP=yes

This is on a custom built kernel, however, I used the Debian 
linux-source package for 2.6.21 and the running config and only disabled 
CONFIG_PARAVIRT to enable the ATi module to build.  The rest of the 
config is unchanged.

My bios doesn't have any settings in for HPET (It doesn't have much more 
than boot order).  Is there anything else I have to do to make the HPET 
work?

Thanks