The blunt tool is still in a lot of GRUB files: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "isolcpus=0,1" Then update-grub (or grub2-mkconfig ) and reboot. Userspace tasks stop landing on CPU0/1. That is all most people verify β€” they fire a few busy loops and top looks empty on those cores. IRQs do not care. isolcpus is a scheduler isolation hint. Hardware interrupts can still fire on the "isolated" CPUs. I watched seven tight loops leave 0/1 idle for processes while /proc/i...