x3d-pinner

Goal

Automatically execute taskset for certain processes (i.e. games) to execute on the Zen 4's V-Cache CCD only.

Implementation

Very basic daemon that automatically executes configured commands if the start of the command line text (/proc/*/cmd) matches with a configured process name in the configuration file for a process owned by a configured username. Commands are only executed once for every PID.

Configuration

The configuration is read from the file /etc/x3d-pinner.ini.

General configuration:

Key	Description	Default value
username	Username of user who will be running the commands configured by this daemon
sleep	Amount of milliseconds to pause between checks for new processes.	5000
allow-root-process	Add command-line to list of processes owned by root that are allowed to be modified by this daemon.
exclude-process	Command-line of processes to never modify.

Configuration per section:

Key	Description
[section-name]	Human-readable name for command to be executed.
command	Which command to execute. Include placeholder {} to insert the PID.
process	Start of command-line (/proc/*/cmd) to match with.

Example

This example will, for the user myusername, automatically pin game ffxiv_dx11.exe to the CCD with 3D V-Cache on a 7950X3D, while also pinning Discord and sway to the high-frequency CPU, while explicitly ignoring sleep. It will perform a check for new processes every 5000 milliseconds.

username=myusername
sleep=5000
allow-root-process=sway
exclude-process=sleep

[vcache]
command=/usr/sbin/taskset -pc 0-7,16-23 {}
process=Z:\\home\\myusername\\.xlcore\\ffxiv\\game\\ffxiv_dx11.exe

[highfreq]
command=/usr/sbin/taskset -pc 8-15,24-31 {}
process=/opt/discord/Discord
process=sway

Example systemd unit

/usr/lib/systemd/system/x3d-pinner.service

[Unit]
Description=Service for automatically renicing and pinning processes to AMD V-Cache CCD.

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/x3d-pinner

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target