> I have a number of older Compaq Proliant boxes.  These are p90s, and have
> a large compliment of nonstandard (non APIC stuff IIRC) components to
> support SMP (not to mention that standard pentiums don't support it "in
> house" either)...  

Have you tried booting an SMP kernel on them yet?  Are you sure they
don't work?  (the MP spec goes back to covering multiprocessor 486
boxes).

> If we had the proper source, dedication, etc... would it theoretically be
> possible to add different ways of spinning up/talking between CPUs?  Or
> are we tied into the standard Intel specs?

It should be possible to restructure the code that way (and, indeed,
in the fullness of time, I'm planning on adding that sort of thing for
MP BIOS vs. ACPI), but it's hard to sensibly add hooks to allow that
sort of variance without having hardware docs to know exactly how
things vary.

					- Bill