AMD64 specific boot options There are many others (usually documented in driver documentation), but only the AMD64 specific ones are listed here. Machine check (see the Opteron BIOS&Kernel manual for more details on the banks etc.) mce=off disable machine check mce=nok8 disable k8 specific features mce=disable disable bank NUMBER mce=enable enable bank number mce=device Enable more machine check options in Northbridge. Can be useful for device driver debugging. mce=NUMBER mcheck timer interval number seconds. Can be also comma separated in a single mce= nomce (for compatibility with i386): same as mce=off APICs nolocalapic Don't use a local or IO-APIC. This should only be needed if you have a buggy BIOS. The newer kernels already turn it off by default if the BIOS didn't enable the local APIC, so it will be hopefully not needed. Note this code path is not very well tested, you are on your own. apic Use IO-APIC. Default noapic Don't use the IO-APIC. Also only lightly tested. pirq=... See Documentation/i386/IO-APIC.txt Early Console syntax: earlyprintk=vga earlyprintk=serial[,ttySn[,baudrate]] The early console is useful when the kernel crashes before the normal console is initialized. It is not enabled by default because it has some cosmetic problems. Append ,keep to not disable it when the real console takes over. Only vga or serial at a time, not both. Currently only ttyS0 and ttyS1 are supported. Interaction with the standard serial driver is not very good. The VGA output is eventually overwritten by the real console. Timing notsc Don't use the CPU time stamp counter to read the wall time. This can be used to work around timing problems on multiprocessor systems with not properly synchronized CPUs. Only useful with a SMP kernel report_lost_ticks Report when timer interrupts are lost because some code turned off interrupts for too long. nmi_watchdog=NUMBER NUMBER can be: 0 don't use an NMI watchdog 1 use the IO-APIC timer for the NMI watchdog 2 use the local APIC for the NMI watchdog using a performance counter. Note This will use one performance counter and the local APIC's performance counter vector. Idle loop idle=poll Don't do power saving in the idle loop using HLT, but poll for rescheduling events. This will make the CPUs burn a lot more power, but may be useful to get slightly better performance in multiprocessor benchmarks. It also makes some profiling using performance counters more accurate. Rebooting reboot=b[ios] | t[riple] | k[bd] [, [w]arm | [c]old] bios Use the CPU reboto vector for warm reset warm Don't set the cold reboot flag cold Set the cold reboto flag triple Force a triple fault (init) kbd Use the keyboard controller. cold reset (default) Using warm reset will be much faster especially on big memory systems because the BIOS will not go through the memory check. Disadvantage is that not all hardware will be completely reinitialized on reboot so there may be boot problems on some systems. Non Executable Mappings noexec=on|off on Enable off Disable noforce (default) Don't enable by default for heap/stack/data, but allow PROT_EXEC to be effective noexec32=opt{,opt} Control the no exec default for 32bit processes. Requires noexec=on or noexec=noforce to be effective. Valid options: all,on Heap,stack,data is non executable. off (default) Heap,stack,data is executable stack Stack is non executable, heap/data is. force Don't imply PROT_EXEC for PROT_READ compat (default) Imply PROT_EXEC for PROT_READ SMP nosmp Only use a single CPU maxcpus=NUMBER only use upto NUMBER CPUs cpumask=MASK only use cpus with bits set in mask NUMA numa=off Only set up a single NUMA node spanning all memory. ACPI acpi=off Don't enable ACPI PCI pci=off Don't use PCI pci=conf1 Use conf1 access. pci=conf2 Use conf2 access. pci=rom Assign ROMs. pci=assign-busses Assign busses pci=irqmask=MASK Set PCI interrupt mask to MASK pci=lastbus=NUMBER Scan upto NUMBER busses, no matter what the mptable says. IOMMU iommu=[size][,noagp][,off][,force][,noforce][,leak][,memaper[=order]] size set size of iommu (in bytes) noagp don't initialize the AGP driver and use full aperture. off don't use the IOMMU leak turn on simple iommu leak tracing (only when CONFIG_IOMMU_LEAK is on) memaper[=order] allocate an own aperture over RAM with size 32MB^order. noforce don't force IOMMU usage. Default. force Force IOMMU for all devices.