How FreeBSD Boots: a soft-core MIPS perspective
نویسندگان
چکیده
We have implemented an FPGA soft-core, multithreaded, 64-bit MIPS R4000-style CPU called BERI to support research on the hardware/software interface. We have ported FreeBSD to this platform including support for multithreaded and soon multicore CPUs. This paper describes the process by which a BERI system boots from CPU startup through the boot loaders, hand off to the kernel, and enabling secondary CPU threads. Historically, the process of booting FreeBSD has been documented from a user perspective or at a fairly high level. This paper aims to improve the documentation of the low level boot process for developers aiming to port FreeBSD to new targets.
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