Booting a PowerPC or MIPS SMP system

On a PPC or MIPS SMP system, the boot sequence is similar to that of an x86, but a specific startup program (e.g. startup-mvp, startup-bcm1250) will be used instead. Specifically, the PPC-specific startup is responsible for:

• determining the number of processors
• initializing each additional processor
• initializing the IRQ, IPI, system controller, etc.

For each additional processor found, the startup code will:

• initialize the processor
• initialize the MMU
• initialize the caches
• set the processor spinning with interrupts disabled, waiting to be released by the kernel