The APIC, the MPS and ACPI
When the BIOS boots the OS startup code into memory and gives control to it, the OS may be capable of utilizing multiple processors (in other words, it may be an MP-capable OS). An MP OS must have some way of determining the number and type of processors present in the system. Most MP-capable OSs presume that the BIOS has already built a resource table in memory that list each of the processors, their Local APICs, any IO APICs and the capabilities of each of the processors. The OS reads the entries to determine what it has to work with. In the PC-compatible world, some OSs expect to find a Multiprocessing (MP) Table in memory. The Intel® version 1.4 MP spec (sometimes abbreviated as MPS) defines the exact structure ...
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