I have a C++ application which uses DPDK to receive packets over two 100 Gbps interfaces from an FPGA device. 

I've isolated cores 0-2. DPDK is using cores 0-2, main lcore on 0, and two receive threads on cores 1 and 2.  The receive threads read packets from mbufs and move the packets to a couple of circular buffers.  This works as expected.

The application starts another set of threads (worker threads) to read from the circular buffers and handle the data. However, these threads are all being assigned to core 0, instead of cores 3-n. 

If I start the worker threads first, before calling rte_eal_init(), they get assigned to non isolated cores as expected.  However, any thread I start from the main thread after calling rte_eal_init() gets assigned to the main lcore core (0).  I can set affinity manually, but I'd rather the kernel scheduler do its thing. 

Is there something I need to do to hand control back to the kernel scheduler for assigning threads to cores after initializing DPDK?

Thanks,

Daniel