dyntick / high resolution timers

Since several month already this patchset is sitting in a separate tree and I feel if I don't push it out to a wider audience now, its rough edges will never get cleaned up, so I pushed what I have into the 2.6.24 patch queue branch and to akpm for -mm.

While it works fine for the configurations I've tested (that's mostly Malta in all variants these days) I have for testing on my desk I'm far from were I'm confident it'll be fine for all platforms, so testing appreciated and also really needed.

Ralf