What got locked off was the P-core's AVX512 instruction support, not some process's core affinity. Intel didn't have an E-core design ready to support AVX512 in

What got locked off was the P-core's AVX512 instruction support, not some process's core affinity. Intel didn't have an E-core design ready to support AVX512 in Alder Lake. They initially allowed AVX512 to be enabled on the P-cores if all the E-cores were disabled at boot, but they later switched to fusing off AVX512 support permanently.