SEE ALSO: Add getcpu(2).

[thirdparty/man-pages.git] / man2 / getcpu.2

.\" This man page is Copyright (C) 2006 Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>.
.\" Permission is granted to distribute possibly modified copies
.\" of this page provided the header is included verbatim,
.\" and in case of nontrivial modification author and date
.\" of the modification is added to the header.
.\" 2008, mtk, various edits
.TH getcpu 2 2008-06-03 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
getcpu \- determine CPU and NUMA node on which the calling thread is running
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
.B #include <linux/getcpu.h>
.sp
.BI "int getcpu(unsigned *" cpu ", unsigned *" node \
", struct getcpu_cache *" tcache );
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.BR getcpu ()
system call identifies the processor and node on which the calling
thread or process is currently running and writes them into the
integers pointed to by the
.I cpu
and
.I node
arguments.
The processor is a unique small integer identifying a CPU.
The node is a unique small identifier identifying a NUMA node.
When either
.I cpu
or
.I node
is NULL nothing is written to the respective pointer.

The third argument to this system call is nowadays unused.

The information placed in
.I cpu
is only guaranteed to be current at the time of the call:
unless the CPU affinity has been fixed using
.BR sched_setaffinity (2),
the kernel might change the CPU at any time.
(Normally this does not happen
because the scheduler tries to minimize movements between CPUs to
keep caches hot, but it is possible.)
The caller must be prepared to handle the situation when
.I cpu
and
.I node
are no longer the current CPU and node.
.SH VERSIONS
.BR getcpu (2)
was added in kernel 2.6.19 for x86_64 and i386.
.SH NOTES
Linux makes a best effort to make this call as fast possible.
The intention of
.I getcpu(2)
is to allow programs to make optimizations with per-CPU data
or for NUMA optimization.

The
.I tcache
argument is unused since Linux 2.6.24.
.\" commit 4307d1e5ada595c87f9a4d16db16ba5edb70dcb1
.\" Author: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
.\" Date:   Wed Nov 7 18:37:48 2007 +0100
.\" x86: ignore the sys_getcpu() tcache parameter
In earlier kernels,
if this argument was non-NULL,
then it specified a pointer to a caller-allocated buffer in thread-local
storage that was used to provide a caching mechanism for
.BR getcpu ().
Use of the cache could speed
.BR getcpu ()
calls, at the cost that there was a very small chance that
the returned information would be out of date.
The caching mechanism was considered to cause problems when
migrating threads between CPUs, and so the argument is now ignored.
.\"
.\" ===== Before kernel 2.6.24: =====
.\" .I tcache
.\" is a pointer to a
.\" .IR "struct getcpu_cache"
.\" that is used as a cache by
.\" .BR getcpu ().
.\" The caller should put the cache into a thread-local variable
.\" if the process is multithreaded,
.\" because the cache cannot be shared between different threads.
.\" .I tcache
.\" can be NULL.
.\" If it is not NULL
.\" .BR getcpu ()
.\" will use it to speed up operation.
.\" The information inside the cache is private to the system call
.\" and should not be accessed by the user program.
.\" The information placed in the cache can change between kernel releases.
.\" 
.\" When no cache is specified
.\" .BR getcpu ()
.\" will be slower,
.\" but always retrieve the current CPU and node information.
.\" With a cache
.\" .BR getcpu ()
.\" is faster.
.\" However, the cached information is only updated once per jiffy (see
.\" .BR time (7)).
.\" This means that the information could theoretically be out of date,
.\" although in practice the scheduler's attempt to maintain
.\" soft CPU affinity means that the information is unlikely to change
.\" over the course of the caching interval.
.SH SEE ALSO
.\" FIXME(mk) add SEE ALSO entries in other pages, pointing to this page
.BR mbind (2),
.BR set_mempolicy (2),
.BR sched_setaffinity (2)