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A.12. numactl
Numactl lets administrators run a process with a specified scheduling or memory placement policy. Numactl can also set a persistent policy for shared memory segments or files, and set the processor affinity and memory affinity of a process.
Numactl provides a number of useful options. This appendix outlines some of these options and gives suggestions for their use, but is not exhaustive.
- --hardware
- Displays an inventory of available nodes on the system, including relative distances between nodes.
- --membind
- Ensures that memory is allocated only from specific nodes. If there is insufficient memory available in the specified location, allocation fails.
- --cpunodebind
- Ensures that a specified command and its child processes execute only on the specified node.
- --phycpubind
- Ensures that a specified command and its child processes execute only on the specified processor.
- --localalloc
- Specifies that memory should always be allocated from the local node.
- --preferred
- Specifies a preferred node from which to allocate memory. If memory cannot be allocated from this specified node, another node will be used as a fallback.
For further details about these and other parameters, see the man page:
$ man numactl

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