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Give userspace a raw disk: /dev/hda and /dev/hdb

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Nothing outside the kernel could touch a disk. sys_mount does not even
look at the device it is handed -- it mounts the one SchFS volume found
at boot and ignores `source` -- so a program had no way to read a
partition table, format a volume or write a boot sector. An installer is
a program that needs all three, so this is the first piece of it.

A character device in devsw rather than a separate block layer, because
that is where the offset already lives: fileread/filewrite pass f->off
and advance it by what comes back, which is everything a seekable device
needs. The minor is the IDE device number, the same numbering iderw()
uses; two schemes for the same disks would be a bug waiting to happen.

Writes bypass every filesystem above them, which is inherent to a raw
device and why an installer must target a disk it has not mounted.

The nodes are created unconditionally, like every other entry in /dev.
That matters more than it looks: with no node, `echo x > /dev/hdb`
silently creates an ordinary file of that name and appears to work. It
did, and it agreed with itself on read-back; only the host's copy of the
disk showed nothing had been written.

st_rdev was never filled, so every node in /dev reported "0, 0" under
ls -l. Harmless while nothing read it, wrong as soon as something has to
tell two disks apart. Filled with the full Linux dev_t encoding rather
than (major << 8 | minor), which only works while both stay small.

Verified against the host as an independent oracle, both directions: the
guest wrote to /dev/hdb and the host saw those bytes at offset 0; the
host wrote at offset 4096 and the guest read them back with dd skip=.
ls -l now shows 1,1 for console, 2,0 for fb0 and 8,1 for hdb.

Known limit, commented in disk.c: devsw passes the offset as a 32-bit
uint, so a raw disk is addressable to 4 GB. That must be widened before
anyone installs onto a real disk.

bootcheck 108 [ok] with -Fb -Tty -Usb -Sock -Evdev -Ps.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-08-09 22:19:40 +02:00
commit 66152ad2f2
7 changed files with 148 additions and 1 deletions
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4
include/defs.h
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@ -404,6 +404,10 @@ void fb_mapped(void);
int fbread(struct inode*, uint, char*, int);
int fbwrite(struct inode*, uint, char*, int);
int fb_ioctl(int request, addr_t arg);
// dev/disk.c -- /dev/hdN, raw seekable access to a whole disk. The minor is the
// IDE device number. Writes bypass every filesystem above them.
int diskread(struct inode*, uint, char*, int);
int diskwrite(struct inode*, uint, char*, int);
// drivers/net/e1000 -- raw Ethernet. No protocol stack above it yet, so these
// are the whole interface: queue a frame, take a frame, and the MAC.
int e1000_transmit(const void *frame, int len);