Sharing a BOINC thread with a higher priority thread on the same core will slow down the higher priority thread. I certainly noticed this on P4s and would regularly pause DC projects when I didn't want to share the core.

BOINC thankfully has an 'only run after idle X minutes' setting that can avoid this problem with regular user input, but doesn't apply to video play back, for example.

Ideally I would like to be able to tell the kernel scheduler to never schedule a BOINC thread alongside a higher priority thread on the same core. Is this possible with any BOINC/OS combination now or is it planned for Atom , i7 or in general?

You can set BOINC to only use half of your CPUs, but you can not control which CPU(s) it runs on.

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BOINCing since 2002/12/8