Oakridge National Laboratory and Cray have investigated a reduced noise kernel [14], but this work mostly focused on moving non-kernel tasks to core 0 and with no intrusive kernel changes described. They move noise generating tasks to one single OS core and make it a job-based decision whether to allocate this single core for system services, depending on the application’s sensitivity to noise.
The idea of tickless kernel in fact is already implemented in the Linux kernel for different reasons. It was introduced into the mainline kernel in version 2.6.21-rc1 and is selected with the CONFIG NO HZ compile-time option. This mechanism is only activated when there are no runnable tasks on the CPU - an idle CPU. It is focused on power savings as the ticks are turned off only when the core is idle.
There is very recent work by Tilera to isolate ticks and another very recent draft for inclusion into the Linux from Weisbecker [18] to add a Nohz option to the cgroup subsystem. Our prototype is separate from these implementations but we recently started a collaboration to integrate a tickless mode into the mainline kernel.