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Setting processor affinity

R

Rhodan

macrumors member
Original poster
Hi,

In Windows you can set applications to run on a specific cpu (processor affinity), I was wondering if you can do this in Mac OSX ?
 
I seem to remember something about Apple's CHUD tools being able to do this. If memory serves, you can find this in the developer software included on the OS X install disc. Its under additional or optional software if I remember correctly. Let me know if that helps. I'd be interested in knowing what you find out.
 
Last I heard, it couldn't do processor affinity.

I would look for it in Leopard. Most of the Linux OS's had to change to deal with multi-core as well as multi-processor.
 
4God said:
Why would you want to do this?
Click to expand...

Processor affinity means a process tends to run on a single processor, rather than getting randomly re-scheduled to other processors.

The way Mac OS X currently works, if a process on core 1 gets stopped (for example, it's waiting for I/O), and while its stopped another process starts running on core 1, when the OS restarts the first process it might move it to core 2 since core 1 now appears busy.

The problem with this is that each core has its own cache, and by moving a process between cores you lose all that cached information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_affinity

To the original poster: 10.4 does not do this (although I guess some people claim it can be done with special tools), but I would expect that this almost definitely a feature in 10.5, especially since the whole line of CPUs is dual-core now.
 
BUMP..

has anyone figured this out?

I'm trying to do RDMSR in ASM and need to bind the running process to direct the opcode to specific procs (albeit logical)..
 
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