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 - filesystem download

filesystem download:

Where Do We Go From Here

With cross tools we could make utility programs for our nascent system. The next step would be incorporating them into a filesystem so that they could run on the native 386, with the kernel program.

Porting Unix to the 386: The Initial Root Filesystem

We build the first instance of the root filesystem - before any operational system is present on the 386 to build one. Part of the bootstrapping cycle of getting up the first running system on a new architecture.

Filesystem Downloading

Having made the initial filesystem on another kind of system, we need to move it into place on the system we are running the kernel on.