Linux® Kernel Primer, The: A Top-Down Approach for x86 and PowerPC Architectures

Chapter 8. Booting the Kernel

In this chapter

• 8.1 BIOS and Open Firmware 423

• 8.2 Boot Loaders 424

• 8.3 Architecture-Dependent Memory Initialization 431

• 8.4 Initial RAM Disk 456

• 8.5 The Beginning: start_kernel() 456

• 8.6 The init Thread (or Process 1) 517

• Summary 522

• Exercises 523

So far, we presented the subsystems of the Linux kernel and the structures central to their operation. Every chapter has assumed that the subsystem was up and running, and we focused on the typical kernel subsystem management and handling operations. However, each subsystem must be initialized before it can be used. This initialization occurs during the kernel bootup, which is a process that begins after the bootloader finishes loading the kernel image into memory and passes processing ...