[SOLVED] Wine & cpu affinity

Question

Hello there.
Simply put, my question is:
Is there a way of launching wine apps with restriction to one cpu core?
Background:
Recently I tried running Unreal Tournament with wine (funny thing is that it seems less painful than running the linux version natively), and there was a problem with game's speed being way too high. I figured out that to make it behave I just need to restrict the game process to one cpu core. Once the game is running, this is done easily by issuing
taskset -cp 0 [PID]
But when I try to run the game using taskset
taskset -c 0 wine UnrealTournament.exe
it has no effect at all. When I check the process' affinity, it turns out that it still uses both cores.
Further investigation shown that this problem seems to be related to wine in general, as even launching winecfg with takset doesn't work properly. Is this happening to someone else? Or, is it working correctly for anyone at all?
For now, the only way (known to me) of setting affinity in wine is to do it on already running process. Am I missing something?
Any help appreciated.
EDIT:
Solved, see #7
Last edited by Rad3k (2010-09-21 17:48:18)

Answer 1

@Darksoul71
Heh, don't know if I'm so die hard UT99 player, but I like it very much, and I'm rather not interested in sequels. It just happens that most of the PC games I consider "best of the best" are those made in 90's. Later, most of the gaming industry gone too commercial, if you know what I mean. They just keep selling same old ideas in shiny new boxes.
Now, back to the topic.
Yeah, I know that I can just run the game, get it's PID and then set the affinity - now I'm doing it this way, by hand. And I'm too much of a perfectionist to let scripts operate on PIDs retrieved by name matching, so I'm searching for alternate solutions
I've tried three test cases, each involving running winecfg, setting it's affinity and checking if it's correct.
1. Run winecfg through taskset:
taskset -c 0 winecfg; sleep 1; taskset -cp $!
The last command shows the actual affinity of the process. I've check and confirmed that PID stored in "$!" is the actual PID of "winecfg.exe" process.
Output is:
[1] 20444
pid 20444's current affinity list: 0,1
What means - setting affinity had no apparent effect.
2. Run winecfg and then immediately set it's affinity:
winecfg& taskset -cp 0 $!; sleep 1; taskset -cp $!
Output:
[1] 20482
pid 20482's current affinity list: 0,1
pid 20482's new affinity list: 0
pid 20482's current affinity list: 0,1
So it seems like it's changing the affinity, but again, with no real effect.
3. Run winecfg, wait a second, and then set affinity:
winecfg& sleep 1; taskset -cp 0 $!; sleep 1; taskset -cp $!
Output:
[1] 20494
pid 20494's current affinity list: 0,1
pid 20494's new affinity list: 0
pid 20494's current affinity list: 0
Now it's working. It seems that somehow, wine is resetting its affinity during startup. Maybe I should ask on wine forums? Because I don't think that it should work like that.
@Gusar
I tried schedtool, but it gives me the same results as taskset. It seems that it's doing basically the same thing, the only difference being that taskset is meant specifically for this while schedtool does this and few other things.
And as for cpu frequency scaling - yes, I restrict it for almost every game I run on wine. Games on wine tend to always use 100% cpu, so I set the "powersave" governor, as 800MHz seems to be enough for most games I play, and it helps keep my laptop's fans quiet.