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 - write protect

write protect:

Porting Unix to the 386: Designing the Software Specification

This, the first article, is the first published mention of 386BSD. By this time, the project had been operational for 18 months, and William Jolitz was at Berkeley working on the Net/2 release.
In this installment, we discussed the beginning of our project and the initial framework that guided our efforts, in particular, the development of the 386BSD specification.

Page Fault Handling

We coded trap handlers and simulated read and write faults to test out page faults with our processor support code. On a 2MB machine, we knew we'd get 1,000's.