See MIPS Run, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15 MIPS Specific Issues in the Linux Kernel

Much of the Linux kernel is written in portable C, and a great deal of it is portable to a clean architecture like MIPS with no further trouble. We looked in the last chapter at the obvious machine-dependent code around exceptions and memory management. This chapter is looking at other places where MIPS-specific code is needed.

The first two sections deal with cases where most MIPS CPUs have traded off programming convenience for hardware simplicity: first, that MIPS caches often require software management and, second, that the MIPS CP0 (CPU control) operations sometimes require explicit care with pipeline effects. We’ll take a quick look at what you need to know about MIPS for a multiprocessor ...