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 - device driver

device driver:

Porting Unix to the 386: Designing the Software Specification

This, the first article, is the first published mention of 386BSD. By this time, the project had been operational for 18 months, and William Jolitz was at Berkeley working on the Net/2 release.
In this installment, we discussed the beginning of our project and the initial framework that guided our efforts, in particular, the development of the 386BSD specification.

Introducing the Standalone System

Originally the test framework to prove kernel parts work in the environment of an protected mode program running on the "raw" machine, this became the bootstrap environment to later load and start the kernel in system operation.

Interrupt Handling

We coded specialized trap handlers for interrupt traps, as these were initimate with the systems interrupt control hardware, not part of the processor.