One example I've seen in the past is that someone wanted to isolate a node
completely from any memory traffic to avoid performance disturbance
for memory intensive workloads.
Right now the system boot could put pages from some daemon in there before any
cpusets are set up and there's no easy way to get them away again
(short of migratepages for all running pids, but that's pretty ugly and won't
cover kernel level allocations and also can mess up locality)
Given the use case wants more a "isolnodes", but given that there
tends to be enough free memory at boot "isolcpus" tended to work.
-Andi
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