On Win32 there''s this timeBeginTime call you can make to fiddle with the task-switching time. Out-of-the-box, it can be anywhere from 5ms to 20ms, but with tBT you can set it to 1ms. In particular, this affects the behavior of calls to Sleep. Is there anything like this for linux? From the timing test I''ve run I''m inclined to believe my system is task-switching at 8ms intervals, as that is the minimum time I can usleep for.

Not really, but some kernels may have scheduler tunables in /proc