The present invention facilitates access to timers in a computing device.
In particular, a timer system facilitates configuring a hardware
interrupt timer in a computing device, the timer being guaranteed to
expire at a specific time in a non-real-time environment. A calling
application passes parameters to a hardware independent application
programming interface (API) to the hardware interrupt timer. The hardware
independent API validates the parameters and relays them to a hardware
dependent API. The hardware dependent API establishes a connection with
the timer in accordance with the validated parameters, and executes a
service routine associated with the application upon expiration of the
timer.