During the 2.5 development series, many people collaborated on the infrastructure to add (easy) and remove (hard) CPUs under Linux. This paper will cover the approaches we used, tracing back to the initial PowerPC hack with Anton Blanchard in February 2001, through the multiple rewrites to inclusion in 2.6.5.

After the brief history lesson, we will describe the approach we now use, and then the authors of the various platform-specific code will describe their implementations in detail: Zwane Mwaikambo (i386) Srivatsa Vaddagiri (i386, ppc64), Joel Schopp (ppc64), Ashok Raj (ia64). We expect an audience of kernel programmers and people interested in dynamic cpu configuration in other architectures.

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