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 - system architecture

system architecture:

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.

Virtual Address Space Layout

386BSD executed programs with a virtual address similar to a VAX running UNIX. In February 1991, this changed so that the format of the process virtual address space memory usage could be arranged differently.