/joh'liks/ n.,adj. 386BSD

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 - file structure

file structure:

The Third PC Utility: cpsw.exe

Once the system is debugged and tested, the next step was to load on more code to expand with. So we moved "tar balls" to the swap space with this utility to provide a primative file upload capability.

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.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We had put the plan of the first article into action, used the second articles tools to load test programs as the kernel, extending standalone operation. This created a base for the kernel and user environment.





Copyright 2006 TeleMuse Partners, William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz