halting the kernel does not stop the CPU cores?

[Heinz Wrobel]

Hi,

I noticed that when halting the kernel (intentionally or not), the cores effectively go into a while(1) loop and power consumption on larger devices really jumps up significantly to the point where, e.g., a “crash” turns into “crash and burn”.

I would assume that if a system is halted, you don’t want to dissipate more power than on a running system but go as silent as low power as reasonable.

Is there any specific reason why the cores would not go into a wfi loop like they do on idle?
The patch to fix this seems to be easy at first glance, but is there a good reason *NOT* to do such a patch and to leave the plain while(1)?

Thanks,

Heinz