In principle you could likely do it. Either call SetProcessAffinityMask on every process on the system to keep them off your dedicated cores, and add a hook to call it on every newly started process. Or simply start your threads with the highest possible priority, with affinity for one core, and never use blocking APIs. In the Windows scheduler a thread of higher priority always gets priority over threads with lower priority, so if you set your priority sufficiently high and never tell the kernel that you are waiting on something you shouldn't get interrupted.
In practice, we've experienced 20 microsecond-100 millisecond thread interruption issues on Windows. The resources we've found are inadequate to address the questions. No such problems on Linux. Windows scheduler experts appear to be rare. We wonder if Windows is simply not amenable to certain types of high-performance applications.
Comments
In principle you could likely do it. Either call SetProcessAffinityMask on every process on the system to keep them off your dedicated cores, and add a hook to call it on every newly started process. Or simply start your threads with the highest possible priority, with affinity for one core, and never use blocking APIs. In the Windows scheduler a thread of higher priority always gets priority over threads with lower priority, so if you set your priority sufficiently high and never tell the kernel that you are waiting on something you shouldn't get interrupted.
In practice, we've experienced 20 microsecond-100 millisecond thread interruption issues on Windows. The resources we've found are inadequate to address the questions. No such problems on Linux. Windows scheduler experts appear to be rare. We wonder if Windows is simply not amenable to certain types of high-performance applications.