program loader:

Why we wrote PC utilities to port UNIX with - the advantage of working from a primitive OS that runs on the absolute machine.

This article, last of the original three done altogether in 1990, on getting the critical pieces functioning independantly that we needed to do the port. Once these we obtained, the kernel was inevitable.

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.

We describe the need and use of a cross-support environment to create 386 code from a non-386 machine, so as to create the initial binarys before our port can generate them.