What if that core isn’t free? What if it’s not going to be free for a long time?

That could be a recipe for random long stalls for some processes.

kragen 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think avoiding such pathological cases would be that hard. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45178286

mrheosuper 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What if that core isn’t free

Just context switch it, like how you run 2 programs with single core cpu

	▲	kragen 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's correct to point out that you could end up in a situation where your "big" cores are all heavily loaded and your "small" cores with less instructions are all idle. That's unavoidable if your whole workload needs the AVX512 instructions or whatever, but it could be catastrophic if your OS just mistakenly thinks it does. But that doesn't seem unavoidable; see my comments further down the thread.