Why One Needs CPU Affinity

Before we cover the new system calls, let's discuss why anyone would need such a feature. The first benefit of CPU affinity is optimizing cache performance. I said the O(1) scheduler tries hard to keep tasks on the same processor, and it does. But in some performance-critical situations--perhaps a large database or a highly threaded Java server--it makes sense to enforce the affinity as a hard requirement. Multiprocessing computers go through a lot of trouble to keep the processor caches valid. Data can be kept in only one processor's cache at a time. Otherwise, the processor's cache may grow out of sync, leading to the question, who has the data that is the most up-to-date copy of the main memory? Consequently, whenever a processor adds a line of data to its local cache, all the other processors in the system also caching it must invalidate that data. This invalidation is costly and unpleasant. But the real problem comes into play when processes bounce between processors: they constantly cause cache invalidations, and the data they want is never in the cache when they need it. Thus, cache miss rates grow very large. CPU affinity protects against this and improves cache performance.

A second benefit of CPU affinity is a corollary to the first. If multiple threads are accessing the same data, it might make sense to bind them all to the same processor. Doing so guarantees that the threads do not contend over data and cause cache misses. This does diminish the performance gained from multithreading on SMP. If the threads are inherently serialized, however, the improved cache hit rate may be worth it.

The third and final benefit is found in real-time or otherwise time-sensitive applications. In this approach, all the system processes are bound to a subset of the processors on the system. The specialized application then is bound to the remaining processors. Commonly, in a dual-processor system, the specialized application is bound to one processor, and all other processes are bound to the other. This ensures that the specialized application receives the full attention of the processor.