My first experience in developing software to run on OS X has been a disappointing one. Previously, I have written software to run on Windows and Linux and in general I have found library or system API calls that provide me with the ability to access the services that I expect to be provided by the operating system. One such service is thread affinity – i.e. the ability to tie a particular thread to a given core. This is achieved using SetThreadAffinityMask() on Windows and sched_setaffinity() on Linux.
However, I was very surprised to find that it does not appear to be possible to do this on OS X!
OS X Leopard introduced a thread affinity API which provides the ability to provide affinity hints to the scheduler to improve data locality in caches. Unfortunately this API does not provide the ability to tie a thread to a core. This is a major gap, especially now that all new PCs and laptops are multi-core.
So why do I want to be able to tie a thread to a core? I want to benchmark a piece of code and one of the data points of interest is to benchmark this code on a single core. With the current Mac OS X thread affinity API, this is not possible!
I’m finding it hard to believe that this service does not exist on OS X – I mean surely somebody must have wanted to run a single core benchmark on OS X running on a multi-core system. But after a couple of hours of googling and reading through the OS X APIs I have been unable to find out how to do this.
