  Halo white dwarfs can provide important information about the properties and
evolution of the galactic halo. In this paper we compute, assuming a standard
IMF and updated models of white dwarf cooling, the expected luminosity
function, both in luminosity and in visual magnitude, for different star
formation rates. We show that a deep enough survey (limiting magnitude > 20)
could provide important information about the halo age and the duration of the
formation stage. We also show that the number of white dwarfs produced using
the recently proposed biased IMFs cannot represent a large fraction of the halo
dark matter if they are constrained by the presently observed luminosity
function. Furthermore, we show that a robust determination of the bright
portion of the luminosity function can provide strong constraints on the
allowable IMF shapes.
