CPU Affinity, Pinning, and Isolation
Affinity constrains where a thread may execute. Isolation coordinates the scheduler, interrupts, background work, and memory placement around a latency-sensitive CPU.
Planned model
Move workers, interrupts, and kernel tasks across a topology map. Show migrations, cache warming, sibling contention, and NUMA locality.
Questions
- What is gained and lost by pinning a thread?
- Why can simultaneous-multithreading siblings interfere?
- Which work still reaches an allegedly isolated CPU?
Exercise
Assign receive, strategy, logging, and housekeeping threads to a two-socket machine and state the assumptions behind the layout.