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http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/booting-an-intel-architectur...
Keyboard not detected. Press any key to continue booting.
A common interview question for software developers is: what happens when you navigate to google.com. When I was working with Linux kernel and coreboot I digged into the datasheet of my motherboard chipset to troubleshoot my unresponsive power button. It was pretty complicated, the kernel driver of the power button (yes, it's a thing!) actually first communicates to the EC/keyboard controller, and setup a GPIO input…
I got asked a similar question from a devops/sysadmin point of view in an interview - If you enter 'ssh somehostnamethatisupandyoucansshto' what happens? I like this sort of question since it has no right or wrong answer, is a good way to get a feel for the breadth and depth of someone's knowledge and also how good they are at getting it across to others.
I'd like to see a description of the real boot process: the one that starts from cold silicon, and the Management Engine fetching its first instruction, as it brings up the main CPU.
When the CPU is switched on, it's put into a very very basic mode. Caches and peripherals are not available, only the registers on Core 0. A very special sequence of instructions hardcoded into the CPU runs to activate the caches and use them as memory. These instructions have no heap and stack, only a few dozen registers to work with. Since this is before the CPU is properly initialized, it has access to shadow regi…