PLPA originated as an attempt to solve the problem of multiple APIs for processor affinity within Linux, but has since grown into a Linux processor affinity toolkit. It provides a Linux distro/kernel/glibc-independent C API for setting and getting processor affinity, and in newer kernels on supported platforms, it also supports mapping (core, socket) tuples to Linux virtual processor IDs. The plpa-taskset command effectively provides command-line access to the C API, and can be used to get/set processor affinity for new or already-running processes. Affinity can be expressed either as a set of Linux virtual processor IDs or (core, socket) tuples.
