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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

Does Linux have mechanisms in place to properly utilize ecores? Specifically tagging background services so they never jump in priority? Or would it be up to me to manually assign affinity?

I read somewhere that part of what makes the iOS experience better is tight control over how much CPU background jobs can steal.

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Linux has had support for cores with different capabilities for ~a decade, when arm introduced big.LITTLE. systemd puts background services in "slices", which can have properties set in bulk.

    systemctl set-property system.slice AllowedCPUs=16-19

Would set the "system" slice to certain pinned cores, but there's nothing automatic.

That’s interesting and easy enough to experiment. While I do not have mixed performance cores, I have been curious if pinning processes results in any noticeable smoothness. I get annoyed at various Gnome garbage that occasionally thrashes.

also has taskset which just lets you say "this PID can run on cores 0 through 13".

Not the friendliest mechanism for defining what runs on what but it's what I use to make sure that server software I really want on the P cores stays on the P cores.

https://docs.kernel.org/scheduler/sched-capacity.html https://docs.kernel.org/scheduler/sched-energy.html

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