linux man page for getcpu

GETCPU(2)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							 GETCPU(2)

NAME
       getcpu - determine CPU and NUMA node on which the calling thread is running

SYNOPSIS
       #include <linux/getcpu.h>

       int getcpu(unsigned *cpu, unsigned *node, struct getcpu_cache *tcache);

DESCRIPTION
       The 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 cpu and 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 cpu or node is NULL nothing is written to the respective pointer.

       The third argument to this system call is nowadays unused.

       The  information  placed  in  cpu  is  only  guaranteed to be current at the time of the call: unless the CPU affinity has been fixed using
       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 cpu and node are
       no longer the current CPU and node.

VERSIONS
       getcpu() was added in kernel 2.6.19 for x86_64 and i386.

CONFORMING TO
       getcpu() is Linux specific.

NOTES
       Linux makes a best effort to make this call as fast possible.  The intention of getcpu() is to allow programs to  make  optimizations  with
       per-CPU data or for NUMA optimization.

       Glibc does not provide a wrapper for this system call; call it using syscall(2); or use sched_getcpu(3) instead.

       The  tcache  argument  is  unused  since Linux 2.6.24.  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 getcpu().  Use of the  cache  could  speed
       getcpu()  calls,  at the cost that there was a very small chance that the returned information would be out of date.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.

SEE ALSO
       mbind(2), sched_setaffinity(2), set_mempolicy(2), sched_getcpu(3), cpuset(7)

COLOPHON
       This page is part of release 3.27 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs,  can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

Linux								    2008-06-03								 GETCPU(2)