Dear rioters,
at today's maintainer meeting [1] we discussed to finally eliminate the special treatment of the hwtimer (being a separate module within core). Though the kernel itself doesn't require this module, we could not think of any useful application without a timer. Since not including and/or initializing the hwtimer caused several hard-to-find bugs in the past, we decided to make building, linking, and initializing it a default behavior from now on. I'll prepare an according PR within the next days.
If anyone sees a good reason not to do this, speak now of forever hold your peace!
Cheers, Oleg
[1] https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/wiki/Contributing-to-RIOT#wiki-community