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 vector

interrupt vector:

The Definition of the 386BSD Specification

Choosing how far to go in supporting X86 architecture in order to get a basic BSD UNIX system to be able to bootstrap the futre efforts.

Interrupt Priority Level Management

Part of the specification also details the interrupt control mechanism that allows device interrupts to be blocked/unblocked and caught by device drivers interrupt handling code.