[$] Soft CPU affinity

On NUMA systems with a lot of CPUs, it is common to assign parts of theworkload to different subsets of the available processors. Thispartitioning can improve performance while reducing the ability of jobs tointerfere with each other. The partitioning mechanisms available oncurrent kernels might just do too good a job in some situations, though,leaving some CPUs idle while others are overutilized. The softaffinity patch set from Subhra Mazumdar is an attempt to improveperformance by making that partitioning more porous.