Hi,

About two weeks ago I sent Richard Henderson the attached email 
detailing a problem with the 2.6.16 kernel booting on my dual processor 
Alpha system.  Today I was able to track down the problem to the call to 
  topology_cpu_callback() in drivers/base/topology.c--specifically, in 
that function the call to get_cpu_sysdev() is returning NULL.  I have 
tracked down the reason and created a small patch that solves the 
problem on my system.  Basically for the Alpha architecture, 
register_cpu is never being called, so get_cpu_sysdev() has nothing to 
return.  Using ppc_init() in arch/ppc/kernel/setup.c, I created a 
similiar function for the Alpha architecture that just registers the CPU 
devices.  Attached are two versions of the patch: one against 2.6.16.1 
and the other against 2.6.17-rc1.

Regards,
Brian Uhrain