Why do I see the message "cpu argument x is out of range" when attempting to use "numactl" with SMT off on a Power system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and later

Environment

IBM System p and System i servers running RHEL 5.2 or greater with SMT disabled

Issue

Attempting to bind a process to the last CPU using 'numactl' will fail. For example, on a system with four cores:

#numactl --physcpubind=6 ./myprogram
numactl: cpu argument 6 is ou...