Accessing other hardware isn't latency-sensitive, though; that's usually disk and the internal network, for logging, telemetry and control. Typically a trading

Accessing other hardware isn't latency-sensitive, though; that's usually disk and the internal network, for logging, telemetry and control. Typically a trading application will keep a thread running on the shared core and send messages between that and its dedicated core thread using lock-free queues, or simple atomics. As you say, writing for bare metal is a lot of hassle and it's unnecessary for the parts of a trading application that don't need to be super fast; using a commodity OS and isolating resources gives the best of both worlds.