First post, by LSS10999
PINNED NOTE: It is completely okay for an ACPI system to not have a usable MP table! As such, it is completely possible for an ACPI-supported system to be not MPS complaint thus not work with MPS-only HALs.
I'm thinking about looking at a system's MPS (MultiProcessor Specification) tables to see if it'll properly run an old Windows NT system (3.51 or 4.0) whose HAL predates ACPI. From the wiki article it suggested something called "mptable" but I failed to find anything useful after googling. I only managed to find some code meant for various kernels to parse MP tables, though.
I once tried running NT 3.51 on an AMD 760G motherboard and I failed to make it boot with the MPS HAL. Only "Standard PC" HAL worked, so I can only use one CPU core. Originally I believed an ACPI-supported system should have no issues with MPS, but after some googling it turned out to be not the case (see pinned note).
On the other hand, some motherboards, such as RUBY-9719VG2AR, do have usable MP tables and can work with the MPS HAL. Its BIOS even offers the option to choose which MPS version, though NT 3.51 works fine even with it set to 1.4, despite it only supported 1.1. It was not until NT 4.0 did Windows had formal MPS 1.4 support.
I also found this old question from someone who wants to "generate MP table from ACPI tables" so MPS-only things would work regardless of MP table status, but that question did not go anywhere.
So where can I find this "mptable" utility that I could take a look at a system's MP table and determine whether a MPS HAL would work on a given board or not?