Hi DPDK Community,

I am facing an issue where CPU affinity is not working as expected in RHEL8 with DPDK 20.05, while it works fine in RHEL7.

Problem Statement:

·  When running my program with numactl -C4,5 ./testRTE on RHEL7, the worker threads correctly bind to the assigned cores.

·  However, on RHEL8, the worker threads always bind to core 1, ignoring the specified CPU set.

Environment Details:

• DPDK Version: 20.05.0
• OS: RHEL8 (Issue) | RHEL7 (Works Fine)
• CPU Affinity Tool: numactl -C

Sample Program:  Attached

Observations:

• In RHEL7, worker threads correctly bind to cores specified using numactl -C.
• In RHEL8, the threads always bind to core 1, ignoring the CPU set.
• Could DPDK be overriding the CPU affinity in RHEL8?

Questions:

1. Is there any known change in CPU affinity handling between RHEL7 and RHEL8 affecting DPDK?
2. Does DPDK override thread affinity when rte_eal_init() is called?
3. Is there any workaround or EAL flag to ensure that CPU affinity is respected?

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Rashi Agarwal.