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 - standalone utilities

standalone utilities:

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.

Filesystem Debugging

Nothing ever goes right the first time, so a incremental process of bringing up the filesystem, from standalone utilities to system initialization allows us to debug flaws in filesystem creation, often artifacts of its non-native creation.