The 386BSD Project and Berkeley UNIXThe 386BSD project was established in the summer of 1989 for the specific purpose of porting the University of California's Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) to the Intel 80386 microprocessor platform. Encompassing over 150 Mbytes of operating systems, networking, and applications software, BSD is a fully functional and nonproprietary complete operating systems software distribution. The goal of this project was to make this cutting-edge research version of UNIX widely available to small research and commercial efforts on an inexpensive PC platform. By providing the base 386BSD port to Berkeley, our hope is to foster new interest in Berkeley UNIX technology and to speed its acceptance and use worldwide. We hope to see those interested in this technology build upon it in both commercial and noncommercial ventures. In each of these articles we will examine the key aspects of software, strategy, and experience that make up a project of this magnitude. We intend to explore the process of the 386BSD port, while learning to effectively exploit features of the 386 architecture for use with an advanced operating system. We also intend to outline some of the trade-offs in implementation goals, which must be periodically reexamined. Finally, we will highlight extensions which remain for future work. Currently, 386BSD is available on the 386 PC platform and supports the following:
While working with us through our 386BSD article series, the following texts are recommended:
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