Installing and Managing HP-UX Virtual Partitions (includes A.04.02)

CPU, Memory, and IO Resources (A.03.xx)
CPU: Bound and Unbound
Chapter 7
210
CPU: Bound and Unbound
Definitions
With vPars, there are two types of CPUs: bound and unbound.
A bound CPU is a CPU that is assigned to and handles IO interrupts for a virtual partition. Every virtual
partition must have at least one bound CPU to handle its IO interrupts.
CPUs that are not assigned to any virtual partition or that are assigned to a virtual partition but do not
handle its IO interrupts are unbound CPUs. Unbound CPUs are sometimes called floater CPUs.
All CPUs begin as not being assigned to any virtual partition, so all CPUs begin as unbound CPUs. Using the
vPars commands, you can assign CPUs to virtual partitions as bound or unbound.
You can migrate both bound and unbound CPUs, but because HP-UX cannot dynamically migrate IO
interrupts, you can dynamically migrate only unbound CPUs.
CPU: Determining Whether to Use Bound or Unbound
When the applications within the target virtual partitions are IO intensive, use bound CPUs because only
bound CPUs can process IO interrupts; specifically, with IO intensive applications there should be more
bound CPUs than unbound CPUs.
If your applications are CPU intensive (and not IO intensive), use unbound CPUs so that you can easily
adjust the number of CPUs via dynamic CPU migration as the demand on the virtual partition changes.
Unbound CPUs provide greater flexibility of movement between virtual partitions because they can be added
and removed without needing to bring down the affected partitions.
CPU: Determining When to Specify a Hardware Path for a Bound
CPU
By default, the vPars Monitor chooses the hardware path of a bound CPU. However, if you need to use a
specific processor, you can specify its hardware path in the vPars commands.
Generally, you do not need to specify a hardware path. The main purpose of specifying hardware paths is
when you need to consider NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) factors, where the distance between a CPU
and memory is critical to performance.