gfx: the second head shows the boot, not just what comes after it

Two things, both asked for.

**The crash report no longer says which monitors it reached.** "The report is
on the virtio-gpu display too" was a line about the crash screen printed on the
crash screen. The report says what happened and where to read it again; that is
not part of it.

**And the second head now shows the F8 menu and the boot.** It used to be black
until vgpud started several seconds into userspace -- through the splash,
through the menu, through every boot message -- which from the outside is
indistinguishable from a display that does not work. Three stages now cover the
whole boot and hand over to each other without coordinating:

*The loader.* LocateProtocol() answers with the first GOP and offers no way to
ask for the rest, so the rest are found by handle and fed the primary's
framebuffer as a Blt source at the points where a screen is finished: the menu,
the resolution chooser, system information, the splash, each segment of the
kernel load. Blt rather than a second framebuffer to draw into, because a
virtio GOP does not have one -- the same fact that made a virtio-only machine
reboot-loop two commits ago.

*The kernel.* gfx remembers which rows were drawn, as one span rather than a
list of rectangles, because console output is lines and a span is what lines
make. display_mirror_console() copies that span across: a line of boot text is
one cell-row transfer, not a screen. Primed once after pci_init(), because a
display that has just appeared has a black scanout and the console it should be
showing was drawn by the loader into a framebuffer it knows nothing about.

*Then vgpud*, from the same console framebuffer, unchanged.

**Two bugs found building it, both worth the retelling.**

The mirror ran per character from inside vt_feed -- which is inside the console
lock -- and vga_disp_acquire() announces its back buffer with a cprintf. A CPU
taking a lock it already holds, with a call chain that said exactly that. It
runs at the end of consolewrite() and cprintf() now, outside the lock, which is
also the better batching: one transfer per write instead of one per character.

And "is this the console's own screen" was asked of the pointer acquire()
returned. vga_fb hands back a back buffer it copies onto the console's
framebuffer afterwards, so on a one-screen machine the answer was "a different
screen" -- and the console was mirrored onto itself through two megabytes of
intermediate, allocated for the purpose. display_ops grew scanout_phys, which
is a fact about the hardware rather than a policy a driver can get subtly
wrong, and it is asked first: it has no side effects and acquire() has two.

Verified with two heads under QEMU, screendumping the virtio head every 400 ms
from power-on: splash, splash, splash, then the console, and it stays. The F8
menu appears on it; choosing 1024x768 there brings both heads up at 1024x768
byte-identical. A panic still reaches both. Both supported configurations: one
boot each, no traps, no panics, socktest and memfdtest green.

One gap remains and is documented rather than hidden: while the kernel's driver
resets the device during probe, QEMU shows "Display output is not active" for a
fraction of a second. A device being taken over has no scanout until the new
driver sets one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-22 21:47:35 +02:00
commit 182cc76588
14 changed files with 437 additions and 42 deletions

21
NOTICE
View file

@ -183,27 +183,6 @@ not be sold on its own. Bundling it with an operating system is expressly
permitted. JetBrains Mono declares no Reserved Font Name, so a modified version
(a pre-rasterised bitmap, for instance) may keep the name.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"New File System For XV6" MIT License
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) Qi Ma, Leyi Pan, Ao Sun, Peiran Xu
kernel/fs/fs.c and parts of tools/mkfs.c derive from this project, which extends
xv6's file system with features SchOS still uses today:
- the HTree hashed directory index (BKDRHash, HASHRANGE, the primary/overflow
bucket layout), after Daniel Phillips, "A Directory Index for EXT2",
5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference, 2001
- Ext4-style extents (T_EXTENT)
- the inode bitmap
- symbolic links, file permissions, lseek and append
Licensed under the MIT License, which permits this use and requires that the
copyright notice and permission notice be retained. This entry is that
retention; it was missing until 2026-08-09 and is recorded here regardless of
what happens to the code, because the obligation attaches to every copy already
made.
Distinct from xv6 itself (LICENSE.MIT), which this project in turn derives from.
================================================================================