[TUHS] Re: Porting Unix v6 to i386

[Lauri Aarnio]

In message <20020130091842.A12653 at apple.ukc.ac.uk>, "P.A.Osborne" writes:
>Well that is what I intended,  certainly as a starting reference for
>floppy, console drivers etc - IDE can wait till later.  Initially I 
>would like to get v6 or 7 (probably 6 as the Lions commentary is
>available) booting a kernel.   

Have you considered using Tanenbaum's Minix as a reference ?
Earlier versions were made for 8086, version 2.0 (which seems
to be te latest?) has been ported to 286/386 (= 16 / 32-bit
protected mode code depending on a flag). And it has a C-compiler,
too. See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html for more.
(I haven't been following Minix development since 1990 or 1991 -
around that time we ported the original minix to the 386 (minix 
2.0 is a different thing, not based on our port). Anyway,
the biggest part of that project was related to protected mode
memory management.
It wasn't as simple as it sounds, mostly because the original 
documents (Intel databooks) were misleading, contained lots of
errors and also otherwise hard to read (bits of information evenly
distributed around the book...). The books may or may not be better
now, but in any case, get a working reference implementation.

	Lauri