CPU pinning or affinity on Harvester 1.3.2

SUSE Virtualization
2

The issue you’re seeing — cpu-manager-policy not being applied after reboot in v1.3.2 — is likely related to a regression or a timing issue with how the kubelet state is initialized on Harvester’s immutable OS. Here are the key troubleshooting steps and observations:

Root cause of the likely issue:

Your /oem/90_custom.yaml includes rm /var/lib/kubelet/cpu_manager_state || true in initramfs commands, which should delete the stale state file before kubelet starts. However, in Harvester 1.3.x, the initramfs stage may run at a different point relative to when RKE2/kubelet initializes, causing the state file to be regenerated with the default none policy before the kubelet args take effect.

Checks to perform:

  1. Verify kubelet is actually receiving the args:

  2. bash

  3. ps aux | grep kubelet | grep cpu-manager

  4. 
If `cpu-manager-policy=static` doesn't appear, the kubelet args from `90-harvester-server.yaml` are not being passed correctly.

  5. Check the kubelet arg config path:

  6. In Harvester v1.3.x, the kubelet args in RKE2 config are processed differently than in v1.4+. Verify that /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml.d/90-harvester-server.yaml is being read at startup:

  7. bash

  8. journalctl -u rke2-server | grep cpu-manager

  9.
    1. State file timing:
    2. The cpu_manager_state file must be deleted before kubelet starts. If your initramfs commands run before kubelet but after the file is created by a previous run, it should work. Try also adding the delete in the boot stage as a fallback:
    3. yaml
    4. stages:
    5. boot:
      • commands:
      • - rm -f /var/lib/kubelet/cpu_manager_state
    1. KubeVirt CPUManager feature gate:
    2. Your KubeVirt config has CPUManager in featureGates — good. But also verify the KubeVirt CPUAllocationRatio is set appropriately for dedicated CPU pinning.

  12. Note on v1.3.2 vs v1.4.0:

  13. Since you mentioned this worked on v1.4.0-dev, this suggests a bug in v1.3.2’s handling of kubelet args or the initramfs stage ordering. Consider upgrading to v1.4.x or later where this was fixed.

Reference: Official Harvester docs > Advanced > Single Node Clusters and the Harvester GitHub issue tracker