Jolitz HeritageJolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz. [ Jolitz Heritage ] |
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Designing the Software Specification
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Designing the Software Specification
Prior to leading the 386BSD project, Bill was the founder and CEO of Symmetric Computer Systems, a BSD-based workstation and networking products manufacturer. He was the principal developer of 2.8 and 2.9 BSD and the chief architect of National Semiconductor's GENIX project, the first virtual memory microprocessor-based UNIX system. Prior to establishing TeleMuse, a market research firm, Lynne was vice president of marketing at Symmetric Computer Systems. She has produced white papers on strategic topics for the telecommunications, electronics, and power industries. Bill and Lynne conducts seminars on BSD, ISDN, and TCP/IP, and are in the process of producing a book on 386BSD and a textbook focusing on the applications layer of the Internet Protocol Suite. They can by contacted via e-mail at william@berkeley.edu or at uunet!william. Copyright (c) 1990 TeleMuse.
The University of California's Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) has been the catalyst for much of the innovative work done with the UNIX operating system in both the research and commercial sectors. Encompassing over 150 Mbytes (and growing) of cutting-edge operating systems, networking, and applications software, BSD is a fully functional and nonproprietary complete operating systems software distribution (see Figure 1). The 386BSD project was established in the summer of 1989 for the specific purpose of porting BSD to the Intel 80386 microprocessor platform so that the tools this software offers can be made available to any programmer or research group with a 386 PC. In coordination with the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley, we successively ported a basic research system to a common AT class machine (see, Figure 2), By providing the base 386BSD port to CSRG, 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 on it in both commercial and noncommercial ventures. In this and following articles, we will examine the key aspects of software, strategy, and experience that encompassed 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 tradeoffs in implementation goals which must be periodically reexamined. Finally, we will highlight extensions which remain for future work, perhaps to be done by some of you reading this article today. Note that we are assuming familiarity with UNIX, its concepts and structures, and the basic functions of the 386, so we will not present exhaustive coverage of these areas. In this installment, we discuss the beginning of our project and the initial framework that guided our efforts, in particular, the development of the 386BSD specification. Future articles will address specific topics of interest and actual nonproprietary code fragments used in 386BSD. Among the future areas to be covered are:
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