One aspect of the invention relates to a method for supporting hibernation despite
the presence of hot-plugged nodes and non-deterministic boot operations. The method
comprises invoking a management interrupt in response to a Hibernate request. The
management interrupt is used to obtain and store platform configuration information
into a non-volatile storage location. The platform configuration information includes
data to indicate whether a next boot sequence for a platform occurs as a deterministic
boot sequence or a non-deterministic boot sequence as well as a boot node identifier
and a listing of an order in which processors of the platform are initialized.