Sometimes, it's useful to have locking.  Especially when we're
talking about time keeping.

It would appear that shemminger's patch of 5th February 2003
completely missed updating _ANY_ ARM timer implementations and,
because linux-arch didn't exist at the time, there appears to
have been no notification to any architecture developer that
maybe, just maybe, some work was required.

One wonders how many other changes are in the kernel which
architecture maintainers have missed.