/joh'liks/ n.,adj. 386BSD
Porting Unix to the 386: A Practical Approach



William & Lynne Jolitz

A breakdown of the various uses of the root filesystems, and the considerations for each as we prove out the operation of the system step by step.




A Brief Review of the Root
We will now briefly review the organization and location of various files and their responsibilities in the UNIX tree-structured filesystem. This is in no way intended to replace the more authoritative descriptions of the UNIX file tree (see The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, by Leffler, et al., Addison-Wesley, 1989 for more information on this topic) but will outline what needs to be present in the root for minimal operation with our 386BSD system.

Example 1: The root directory generated by the UNIX ls command (ls -l), shows file attributes, link count, ownership, file size, modification date, and file name
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root      1536 Feb  3 10:18 bin/
  -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     20480 Sep  4 21:02 boot*
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root      1024 Feb 22 13:32 dev/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root      1536 Mar  5 18:31 etc/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Dec  7 12:41 lib/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root      4096 Dec  7 12:41 lost+found/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Aug 16 1990  mnt/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Dec  6 12:11 root/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root      1024 Dec  8 12:45 sbin/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Sep 19 09:18 stand/
  lrwxr-xr-x    1 root        12 Jun  4 1990  sys@ --> /usr/src/sys
  drwxrwxrwx    2 root       512 Mar  5 18:31 tmp/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Jan 26 22:12 usr/
  drwxr-xr-x    2 root       512 Jan 27 23:12 var/
  -rwxr-xr-x    1 root    319488 Feb 22 08:57 vmunix*

In Example 1, the root directory, we can see the base of the root filesystem containing all of the top-level directories and files in our 386BSD system. This listing, generated by the UNIX ls command (ls -l), shows file attributes, link count, ownership, file size, modification date, and filename. Three kinds of files are present here (as indicated by the first character of attributes): directories (d), symbolic links (l), and regular files (-). Files in the root serve the functions of installation, booting, system initialization, device configuration, basic utilities, system operations, and so on.


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Copyright 1990, 2006 TeleMuse Partners, William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz