Subject: Re: Kernel Panic booting cdrom

From: [email-masked] (Linas Vepstas)
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:35:59 -0500

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 02:05:11PM -0700, David Huffman wrote:
> there may be power and cooling daemons that are not running and try to 
> limit the system resources by limiting the number of cpus. Does this 
> sound right? 

As Michael Ellerman points out, the answer is no.
The idle loop specifically uses instructions that put the
cpu into low-power mode. If you don't call the idle loop, the 
cpu probably won't go into low-power mode!

> The maxcpus=1 argument was something we added to our install boot 
> media years ago and few here remember why it was such a great idea. The 
> power/resource management was the only thing we could come up with.

Ooh, this is worthy of tatooing onto a cluestick.

--linas