docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap

docs/ was ten files where a plan, a description, a guide and a bug report all
sat next to each other. It is now architecture/ (what SchOS is), plan/ (what it
will be), guides/ (how to work on it) and history/ (why it is like this), with
an index that states the one rule holding it together: when something is
finished it moves from plan/ to architecture/ and is rewritten as a description
of the thing rather than a record of building it.

A ticked checkbox says the work happened. It does not say what the work
*produced*, and six months later the checkbox is all that is left. The network
stack proved the point: finished, verified end to end, and for a month the only
description of it anywhere was a checkbox four levels of indentation deep.

So roadmap.md went from 534 lines to 181 -- nothing deleted, the done work
graduated. Seven subsystems that were finished and undescribed now have
descriptions: boot, kernel, syscalls, filesystem, networking, graphics, usb,
init. Every one ends with "What it does not do", which is the section that pays;
a document listing only strengths is marketing, and the reader who needs it most
is the one about to trip over a limitation nobody wrote down.

schfs.md still opened with "phases 1 through 3 1/2 are done, phase 4 is next"
long after all five had landed. It is a description now, with the phase record
and the hard-won bugs moved to history/.

Three corrections found on the way, all load-bearing:

  * projects/schcom/README.md claimed SCM_RIGHTS was done. There is no
    sendmsg/recvmsg in the kernel at all, and an entire GUI plan rested on it.
  * The root README said "No TCP/IP" months after the stack landed.
  * history/kernel.md sec.7 was marked "in progress" on a problem that process
    groups solved.

Also adds plan/1.0.md, which draws a finish line so the open list stops being
infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is
the window manager, so that split dissolves rather than being abandoned.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
commit 57aff40228
59 changed files with 3981 additions and 1124 deletions

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# Syscalls, and the Linux personality
Two things happen at this boundary. SchOS has its own syscall numbering, and it
also answers Linux's — which is why musl, toybox and mksh run unmodified.
---
## One table, everything generated
**Syscalls are declared in exactly one place:**
[`kernel/sys/table.inc`](../../kernel/sys/table.inc). One line each.
```c
SYSCALL(nr, linux_nr, name) // implemented as sys_<name>()
SYSCALL_ALIAS(linux_nr, name) // a second Linux number for the same handler
```
Three things are generated from it by macro expansion, and none is
hand-maintained:
| Generated | Where |
|---|---|
| The `SYS_*` constants | `include/syscall.h` |
| The dispatch table | `kernel/sys/syscall.c` |
| The Linux translation map | `kernel/sys/linux_abi.c` |
Adding a syscall is therefore two edits: a line here, and a body written with
`SYSCALL_DEFINE(<name>)` in one of the `kernel/sys/sys_*.c` files.
**This replaced a two-place scheme and the reason is worth keeping.** The Linux
number used to live in a second hand-written table. Adding a syscall meant three
edits across two files, and forgetting the second one left the call *unreachable
from every musl-linked program* while looking perfectly registered in the first.
A syscall can no longer be half-registered.
## How a Linux binary runs
The translation is a flat array indexed by Linux syscall number, whose value is
the native `SYS_*` number — or 0, meaning not implemented, which dispatches to
`-ENOSYS`.
It is enabled **per process**, and selected automatically by `exec()`:
```c
// musl binaries have entry >= 0x100000; SchOS-native ones are linked at 0x4000
if (elf.entry >= LINUX_ABI_ENTRY_THRESHOLD)
myproc()->syscall_map = linux_syscall_map;
```
A link address is a crude discriminator and it is honest about being one. It
works because the two classes of binary in this system are linked by two
different linker scripts at two very different addresses.
There is also `enable_linux_abi()` as an explicit call, which is why
`cmd/schinit/main.c` carries a warning not to use it: doing so mid-process would
renumber the syscalls the caller still has to make.
### Native vs. Linux numbering
Some calls have no Linux equivalent and are marked `NO_LINUX`: `sleep`,
`uptime`, `reboot`, `shutdown`, `getmouse`, `vga_sync`, `schfs_index`,
`schfs_query`. These are reachable only from first-party programs linked
against `lib/`.
They all land on the same scratch index in the translation array and overwrite
each other there, which is harmless — no real Linux syscall uses that number, so
the slot is never dispatched.
### Where the two disagree on a name
`shutdown` is the one collision. SchOS has a native `shutdown()` that powers the
machine off, and Linux number 48 is the socket call. Two syscalls cannot share a
`sys_` function name, so Linux 48 maps to `sockshutdown`.
## What is implemented
Roughly 190 native numbers covering:
| Area | |
|---|---|
| Process | fork, exec, exit, wait/waitpid/wait4/waitid, clone, kill, sessions, process groups |
| Identity | the full real/effective/saved set for both uid and gid, groups, umask |
| Memory | mmap, munmap, mprotect, brk/sbrk, madvise, System V shared memory |
| Filesystem | the ordinary set, the whole `*at()` family, statfs, xattr, mount/umount2 |
| I/O | read/write, readv/writev, pread/pwrite, sendfile, poll/select/ppoll/pselect6, epoll, ioctl, fcntl |
| Sockets | socket, bind, listen, accept, connect, sendto, recvfrom, socketpair, setsockopt, getsockopt |
| Signals | rt_sigaction, rt_sigreturn, rt_sigsuspend, rt_sigpending, rt_sigtimedwait, sigaltstack |
| Time | gettimeofday, clock_gettime, clock_getres, nanosleep, clock_nanosleep, alarm, timers |
| Notification | eventfd2, timerfd_create/settime/gettime, signalfd4 |
### Argument fetching
`fetchint`, `fetchaddr`, `fetchstr` and `argptr` validate a user pointer through
the page tables and nothing else. They previously rejected any address
`>= proc->sz`, on the assumption that every valid user pointer lives in the
heap — which is wrong for stack addresses and for every `mmap`'d buffer, i.e.
for most pointers real programs pass.
`uva2ka()` translates a user virtual address and **returns the in-page offset**,
which it did not originally do. Every caller that read or wrote through a
non-page-aligned pointer — `TIOCGPGRP`, `TCGETS`, `getcwd`, signal masks,
`times()`, `sysinfo()` — was touching the wrong address whenever the pointer was
not page-aligned, i.e. almost always.
**`uva2ka()` guarantees only the page containing that address.** A structure
copied in bulk through one translation runs off the end of the mapped page when
the pointer lands near a boundary — and `P2V` is a flat offset, so "the next
page" in kernel space has nothing to do with the user's next page. That bug
corrupted unrelated kernel memory and crashed every freshly `exec`'d shell. Copy
field by field, each through its own translation, or use `copyin`/`copyout`.
---
## What it does not do
- **No `sendmsg`/`recvmsg`**, and therefore no ancillary data and no
`SCM_RIGHTS`.
- **No `memfd_create`.**
- **No `getsockname` or `getpeername`**, and `accept()` does not report an
AF_INET peer's address.
- **`setsockopt` handles six options** and answers `ENOPROTOOPT` for everything
else. `SO_RCVTIMEO`/`SO_SNDTIMEO` are among the refused.
- **`clone` does not share an address space**, so it is `fork` with extra steps.
- **`sched_setaffinity` is accepted and ignored.**
- **`getrusage` does not distinguish `RUSAGE_CHILDREN`** from `RUSAGE_SELF`, and
fills in only the calling process's own tick count.
- **The ABI is chosen by link address.** It works, and it is a heuristic rather
than a fact about the binary.
- **`/proc/<pid>/exe` is a regular file, not a symlink**, so `readlink()` on it
fails and `ps -o comm` prints `[init]` rather than `init`. Default `ps` and
`top` output is unaffected.