I was wondering if anyone knows what apm and acpi actually do on non-laptop desktop system?

I've experimented a littlebit and this is what I've found: apm doesn't seem to support SMP (I have a HT pentium4) so I have to use acpi. Acpi has lots of error messages as default, so I thought I'd turn it off alltogether. Unfortunately SMP doesn't seem to work without it (my system only has 1 cpu @ /proc/cpu then).

Then I tried passing acpi=ht to my kernel. Now hyperthreading works perfectly and I have no acpi errors messages anymore. (I assume =ht only uses acpi to get hyperthreading and doesn't actually use it at all other than for that). The problem is, I have no power management atm. Does it matter? I have no problems with having to switch the power button after shutting down my system, but I'm wondering if not using any power management can damage my hardware or something similar?

acpi's quite fine since you'll get information 'bout your hardware (frequency, temperature) and also allows you to turn off your pc by pushing the powerputton or put it to sleep,..

nice for saving power, but it won't hurt if you switch it off.

sl mritch.