This tip is for all those OS X developers out there. I’ve been bothered for a while that OS X didn’t export thread affinity scheduling to user-space. That is, the functionality for a programmer to tell the system that a specific thread should run on a specific processor core was not available.

With Leopard, Apple has released a Thread Affinity API to

supply thread affinity hints to the kernel scheduler for improving documents locality in caches, among other uses. While it is still not a full implementation like sched_setaffinity() is in Linux, it should assemble parallel programming a little bit more effective and portable.

Details on the API can be found …

Original post by Mike Schramm