panic: blink the keyboard lights, and mark the screen on the way in
A laptop has no serial port, and the machine we are trying to boot stops with the loader's splash still on screen. Three completely different things look exactly like that: the jump never landed, the kernel started and hung, or the kernel started and panicked with a full report drawn into a framebuffer nobody can see. They call for different next steps, so the kernel now says which without needing a console at all. **A bar, as the kernel's first act.** Eight lines of accent colour across the top of the framebuffer, written straight through the handoff block before a single subsystem exists -- no gfx, no scanout, no allocator, nothing that can itself fail. If it appears over the splash, the jump landed and the kernel is executing. If it does not, nothing below that point is worth looking at. Skipped when the framebuffer is above the direct map, because a fault there leaves the machine quieter still, and free on a boot that works: the console clears the screen a few lines later. **Blinking keyboard lights, on panic.** Scroll, Num and Caps together, about three times a second, for ever. It is the one output every PC has had since before any of this existed -- no driver, no interrupt, no memory -- and it works when the graphics do not. Linux does the same thing for the same reason. Every wait in it is bounded. It runs after `panicked` is set so there is nothing left to protect, but a machine that hangs inside its own death rattle tells you less than one that stops quietly. The delay is microdelay, which spins on the TSC: no timer, no interrupt, no calibration -- all three of which a kernel that died during boot may not have. That makes the three cases distinguishable from across the room: no bar and no blink is a jump that did not land; a bar and no blink is a kernel that hung; a blinking keyboard is a panic, and the report is in /proc/kmsg after a restart. **And the loader now describes the mode it is actually handing over**, not only the one the firmware started in. On a machine where changing the resolution loses the splash entirely, the difference between those two lines is the bug report; on a boot that works nobody sees either, because ClearScreen runs a few lines later. Verified: `echo c > /proc/sysrq`, then QMP polled for five and a half seconds afterwards -- the machine answers throughout and a screendump still shows the panic report intact, so the blink loop runs without faulting, resetting, or scribbling on what it is there to accompany. Both supported configurations boot clean with the early bar in place. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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0331d548c4
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4 changed files with 151 additions and 2 deletions
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@ -50,6 +50,34 @@ kmain(uint32 fb_addr)
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boot_verbose = *(uchar*)P2V(SCHBOOT_VERBOSE_FLAG);
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boot_debug = *(uchar*)P2V(SCHBOOT_DEBUG_FLAG);
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// The kernel's first act: put a mark on the screen.
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//
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// Eight lines, before a single subsystem exists, because "the loader
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// finished and the machine froze" has two completely different causes and
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// nothing else here can tell them apart. If this bar appears over the
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// loader's splash, the jump landed, the page tables are good and the kernel
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// is executing; if it does not, none of those are true and everything below
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// is the wrong place to look.
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//
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// It writes straight through the handoff block rather than through gfx,
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// because gfx needs a scanout attached and attaching one is itself a thing
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// that can fail. Skipped when the framebuffer is above the direct map -- a
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// fault here would be a triple fault with the machine even quieter than it
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// was. It costs nothing on a boot that works: the console clears the screen
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// a few lines later.
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{
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uint64 pa = *(uint64*)P2V(SCHBOOT_FB_BASE);
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uint32 w = *(uint32*)P2V(SCHBOOT_FB_WIDTH);
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uint32 st = *(uint32*)P2V(SCHBOOT_FB_STRIDE);
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if (pa && w && st && pa + (uint64)st * 8 <= 4ULL << 30) {
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volatile uint32 *px = (volatile uint32 *)P2V(pa);
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for (uint32 y = 0; y < 8; y++)
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for (uint32 x = 0; x < w; x++)
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px[y * (st / 4) + x] = 0x7C5CFF; /* SCH_ACCENT */
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}
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}
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// On a verbose boot, put the kernel log on the screen from the first line.
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//
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// Everything below talks to the serial port and nothing else until the first
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