Is it possible for a child process created by fork() on Linux to run on a separate core in an SMP environment?

Question

When calling fork(), what practices exist to ensure that the child process can run in parallel on a separate core?

Answer 1

None. You can set the parent process and the child process to have disjoint affinities, but you cannot force them to run in parallel.

Answer 2

1. Actually having another core in your system to run it on and having that not disabled in the firmware, 2. having a kernel with SMP support, and not having it disabled either. 3. Not having your process locked to one core (keyword: cpu affinity mask).