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In a parallel programming library, we pin each process to a different core. However, we overlooked the fact that a given core might already be busy and have another CPU-intensive process already pinned to it. Is it possible to ask the Linux (and OS X) kernel to list all the cores which don't have a process pinned? I know how to pin a process to a core (sched_setaffinity on Linux). But, in a multi-user system, I'd like the kernel to tell me if it is a good idea to pin to that core. Or, even better, let the kernel decide to which core this process should be pinned to. Thanks!

daruma
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    In general GNU/Linux is quite good at scheduling. This can be seen when running a single 100% CPU process on an idle multicore machine. `htop` can show which core is busy, and it remains the same one for several seconds. Do you have any measurements that indicates that it can be done better? – Ole Tange Nov 30 '17 at 08:51
  • The implementors of the library found that core pinning significantly improve the performance. I agree that the natural CPU affinity of the Linux kernel is not bad, but sometimes it still shuffle processes around. – daruma Dec 01 '17 at 02:20

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