cset for partitioning user and system processes

taskset only allows you to set something called the CPU affinity, meaning you can tell the system to run a certain process on some cores only. However, in order to tell the OS to run only your process on a given core, you need to use something called cpuset. This is a pseudo-filesystem which manages how processes are distributed among cores. man cpuset for more info. While cpuset is nice and everything, it is not very intuitive to use, especially if you just want to run your own process(es) separately from the general bunch of system-upkeep processes. A nice interface for cpuset is cset, whose shield command does exactly this. man cset and cset-shield for more info. Also take a look at this tutorial. If you are hell bent on using cpuset nonetheless, just remember that moving sbin/init into the system cpuset along with the “general” lot of processes ensures that any newly spawned processes are also restricted to that cpuset. Oh and dont forget to set the cpu_exclusive flag.