Porting Unix to the 386: A Practical Approach

William & Lynne Jolitz

Started open source UNIX.

Appeared in part as a 17 article magazine series in 1991-1992.

Documented the "how, what, why, who, when" of porting BSD to the 386.

Done while BSD was becoming "open source".

Porting Unix to the 386: A Practical Approach - Interrupt Descriptor Table

Interrupt Descriptor Table:

Microprocessor Idiosyncrasies

Sometimes you're forced to use processor features - like hardware context switching. Origionally, the earliest versions of 386BSD didn't use the hardware context switch TSS feature - but you still had to have one anyways.

Processor Support -- i386.c

We initialized the processor with initial descriptor and page tables - one needs to run with the tables before activating memory/interrupt kernel functions.