Hi,
This patchset consists of 6 patches that have been tested **not** to break both smp and non-smp systems, but get us closer to having smp working fully. The rationale for going with parallel init for smp is that APICs are not individually addressible for more than 8 cpus (in logical mode) or 16 cpus (in physical mode), unless it is a Pentium 4 or Xeon processor, where you may address 256 individual APIC ids. Also, if the physical apic id > 0xf, you can't address it at all with physical mode on modern non-Xeon cpus. Therefore, to support INIT and STARTUP on > 8 cpus, we need to use a physical IPI that broadcasts to all apics except BSP itself. I think this is the only way to address all the cpus to wake up. So, we need parallel smp init. I am working on a branch to get this working but currently the remainder of my patches hang the system occasionally, so I have not included any here. Damien
