Kernel code interrupted by Timer

What happens if the kernel executing in some process context (let's say executing a time-consuming syscall) gets interrupted by the Timer - which is apparently allowed in 2.6 onwards kernels. My understanding is that once the interrupt handler is done executing, we should switch back to where the kernel code was executing. Specifically, the interrupt handler for the Timer interrupt should not schedule some other task since that might leave kernel data in an inconsistent state - kernel didn't finish doing whatever it was doing when interrupted. So, does the Timer interrupt handler include such a policy for the above case? -- Gaurav Jain