Check Point Alert of the Week: A NIC and fw_worker shouldn’t be assigned to the same core

This is a real life sample alert from indeni.

Description:

Having one or more NICs assigned to the same CPU core as an fw_worker will result in degraded performance.

Affected Cores:

Core 0 is assigned to both eth1 and fw_0

Manual Remediation Steps:

Update the affinity of cores. Follow the CoreXL documentation.

How does this alert work?

indeni runs “fw ctl affinity -l” and analyzes the output, looking for a situation where one of the fw lines (fw_0, fw_1, etc.) are associated with a core that is also associated with a NIC.