Previously, the timer was used to remember the state of the time slices.
This was sufficient before priorities entered the scene as a thread always
received a fresh time slice when he was scheduled away. However, with
priorities this isn't always the case. A thread can be preempted by another
thread due to a higher priority. In this case the low-priority thread must
remember how much time he has consumed from its current time slice because
the timer gets re-programmed. Otherwise, if we have high-priority threads
that block and unblock with high frequency, the head of the next lower
priority would start with a fresh time slice all the time and is never
superseded.
fix#1287
Martin Stein