Jolix
/joh'liks/ n.,adj. 386BSD
PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A PRACTICAL APPROACH


William & Lynne Jolitz


We started with a cheap lunchbox PC with a 40MB drive, and had to change as we exhausted serial downloads and DOS was squeezed of the drive for space for BSD.




Other Cross-Support Issues
In the area of cross-host communications, a few amusing irritants developed. When we first used Kermit and ordinary serial lines for the early standalone system and kernel work, the few minutes of download delay to MS-DOS were livable, given that the debugging time required for each cycle was usually about 20 minutes. As we got more proficient with the 386, however, and as we reached the limits of our documentation on 386 features, our debug sessions became shorter than the download time. Also, downloading a kernel (100 to 200 Kbytes) or a filesystem (1 to 5 Mbytes) began to occur more frequently, thus eating up even more time. Finally, with the help of a cheap (approximately $100) Ethernet card, we migrated to NCSA Telnet. This change cut the download time to a more reasonable number.

Success frequently results in its own problems; we rapidly filled our tiny 40-Mbyte drive. It became increasingly difficult to manage slightly different versions of utilities, and the cheap and clever tricks we had used to bypass some development steps were themselves becoming stumbling blocks. Because we were sharing the disk with MS-DOS and using MS-DOS utilities to communicate with the outside world, files had to fit in the MS-DOS partition. By this time, it was clear that the tenuous partnership between MS-DOS and BSD was drawing to an end.


<<BACK NEXT >>



Copyright 1990, 2006 TeleMuse Partners, William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz