SMP operating systems have choices when it comes to scheduling processes: a new or newly rescheduled process can run on any available cpu.
However, while it shouldn’t matter where a new process runs, an existing process should go back to the same cpu it was running on simply because the cpu may still be caching data that belongs to that process. This is particularly apt to be true if the process is a thread: the other threads in the same program are very likely to have cpu cache of interest to their brethren (though obviously this also diminishes the performance gain that might be seen from multithreading) . For these reasons, scheduling algorithms pay attention to cpu affinity and try to keep it constant.
It is possible to force a process to run only on a certain cpu. There are Linux system calls (sched_setaffinity and sched_getaffinity) and a command line “taskset”.
Most of us probably don’t need to bother with being heavy handed here. The Linux scheduler probably does a better job assigning processes to cpu’s than we would. There may be conditions where you want to effectively dedicate a cpu to a certain process. Usually that means forcing all other processes to another cpu to prevent them from migrating to the cpu you want to keep dedicate.
That’s not too hard if we are only dealing with two cpu’s because processes inherit affinity from their parants. So if you forced “init” to bind to cpu 0, all of its children would inherit that restriction and wouldn’t use cpu one unless specifically set. You’d then set your “special” process to use cpu 1. This only gets a little more complicated with more than two processors; available cpu’s are just a bit mask, so you would bind init to use more than one cpu but not the one you want to keep clear.
*Originally published at APLawrence.com
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
