How to restricit my cpu affinity to a subset of the cpus available on a given machine?

Question

I am working on a machine with 4 sockets with another person that launch performance tests on one precise socket and does not want anybody to iterfer with this socket.

I would like to work transparently on the 3 remaining sockets. How could could I do that, something like prefixing all my commands with numactl... ??

My shell is zsh

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm assuming this is Linux?

If yes, cpusets are probably what you're looking for. There is also a cpuset userspace package that supposedly makes it easier to use the cpusets mechanism in the kernel.

While I have almost no experience with this, I think you should be able to create a cgroup, move your shell to it, and restrict the cgroup to use only the other CPUs. This restriction would be inherited by all processes started from that shell.