processor

I'd like to specify the cpu-affinity of a particular pthread. All the references I've found so far deal with setting the cpu-affinity of a process (pid_t) not a thread (pthread_t). I tried some experiments passing pthread_t's around and as expected they fail. Am I trying to do something impossible? If not, can you send a pointer please? Thanks a million. This is a wrapper I've made to make my life easier. Its effect is that the calling thread gets "stuck" to the core with id core_id : // core_id = 0, 1, ... n-1, where n is the system's number of cores int stick_this_thread_to_core(int core_id)

Why is the size of L1 cache smaller than that of the L2 cache in most of the processors ? There are different reasons for that. L2 exists in the system to speedup the case where there is a L1 cache miss. If the size of L1 was the same or bigger than the size of L2, then L2 could not accomodate for more cache lines than L1, and would not be able to deal with L1 cache misses. From the design/cost perspective, L1 cache is bound to the processor and faster than L2. The whole idea of caches is that you speed up access to the slower hardware by adding intermediate hardware that is more performing