Pat, Any such description is either going to be very hardware/system specific, or vague to the point of uselessness. The experience of the NetBSD community, which prides itself on extreme portability and working around broken or ... let's say "incomplete" vendor firmware, is that such things are highly system-specific. The vague description is easy: some booter or firmware loads the kernel into RAM, the kernel initializes the MMU and the rest of the processor(s), devices are somehow probed or listed and device drivers called to initialize minimally necessary I/O devices (console, data storage so you can mount / (root)), a process is created, and /sbin/init is exec'd. Details of firmware or booter provided environment and parameters to the kernel vary a lot; thus that famously small-ish percentage of any Unix kernel that is written in assembler for the processor involved, rather than C. See also https://www.quora.com/Are-bootloaders-like-GRUB-and-LILO-hardware-specific/… https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-concise-explanation-for-the-UNIX-bootstrap-… Erik

It may not be exactly what you were thinking of, but there have been a few “bring-up” papers to come out of NetBSD about getting it working on new CPU architectures and new system types. Perhaps one of those is what you read? -- Chris