Getting the Linux kernel running on a new processor architecture is not as difficult a procedure as one might think. A well-defined skeleton, shared by the majority of ports, exists and can logically be split into two parts.
The first part is the boot code, the arch-specific code that is executed from the moment the kernel takes over from the bootloader until init is finally executed. The second part concerns the arch-specific code that is regularly executed once the booting phase has been completed and the kernel is running normally (e.g. starting new threads, dealing with interrupts, serving system calls, etc.).
In this talk, Joël Porquet will provide an overview of the procedure that he carried out, from the early assembly boot code to adding SMP support (and some early-NUMA support).
