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CPU Affinity

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CPU affinity, also called CPU pinning, enables the binding of a process or a thread to a specific CPU core, or CPU cores.

The following function is provided as a standard library to set affinity. [reference]

#include <sched.h>

int sched_setaffinity(pid_t pid, size_t cpusetsize, cpu_set_t *mask);
int sched_getaffinity(pid_t pid, size_t cpusetsize, cpu_set_t *mask);

On success, schedu_setaffinity() and sched_getaffinity() return 0. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

cpu_set_t can be set by defined macros as follows. [reference]

void CPU_ZERO(cpu_set_t *set);
void CPU_ZERO_S(size_t setsize, cpu_set_t *set);
void CPU_SET(int cpu, cpu_set_t *set);
void CPU_CLR(int cpu, cpu_set_t *set);
int CPU_ISSET(int cpu, cpu_set_t *set);
...

cpu_set_t *CPU_ALLOC(int num_cpus);
void CPU_FREE(cpu_set_t *set);
...

where int cpu is the number of CPU cores. It should be one among 0~num_cpus-1. For example, it can be 0~7 if there are 8 logical processors in a machine.

The following code will make this program be run only in CPU number 7.

cpu_set_t *mask = NULL;
int num_cpus = 8;
size_t size;

// Memory allocation
// null exception handling is omitted.
mask = CPU_ALLOC(num_cpus);

// Zero initialization
size = CPU_ALLOC_SIZE(num_cpus);
CPU_ZERO_S(size, mask);

// Add a mask for CPU 7
CPU_SET_S(7, size, mask);

// Set affinity
sched_setaffinity(getpid(), size, mask);

CPU_FREE(mask);

References #

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