Chapter 27. Configuring CPU Affinity and NUMA policies using systemd

CPU affinity settings help you restrict the access of a particular process to some CPUs. Effectively, the CPU scheduler never schedules the process to run on the CPU that is not in the affinity mask of the process.

The default CPU affinity mask applies to all services managed by systemd.

To configure CPU affinity mask for a particular systemd service, systemd provides CPUAffinity= both as a unit file option and a manager configuration option in the /etc/systemd/system.conf file.

The CPUAffinity= unit file option sets a list of CPUs or CPU ranges that are merged and used as the affinity mask. The CPUAffinity option in the /etc/systemd/system.conf file defines an affinity mask for the process identification number (PID) 1 and all processes forked off of PID1. You can then override the CPUAffinity on a per-service basis.

To set CPU affinity mask for a particular systemd service using the manager configuration option:

Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory subsystem design, in which the memory access time depends on the physical memory location relative to the processor.

Memory close to the CPU has lower latency (local memory) than memory that is local for a different CPU (foreign memory) or is shared between a set of CPUs.

In terms of the Linux kernel, NUMA policy governs where (for example, on which NUMA nodes) the kernel allocates physical memory pages for the process.

You can use the NUMAPolicy and NUMAMask systemd unit file options to control memory allocation policies for services.

To set a global NUMAPolicy setting using the [Manager] configuration option:

Systemd provides the following options to configure the NUMA policy: