root: find the filesystem instead of being told at build time, and fix dmesg

`#define ROOTDEV 1` -- IDE disk 1 -- so a kernel could only ever root on the
disk it was *built* expecting. Booting the same image from a USB stick was
impossible by construction, and that was the one thing standing between this
kernel and its own acceptance test, which begins "boot on real hardware from a
USB stick".

rootdev_mount() probes. schfs_kmount() was already written for exactly this --
its own comment says "the uberblock scan doubles as the probe: no valid
uberblock means this is simply not a SchFS volume, which is not an error worth
reporting loudly" -- and a failed probe leaves the slot unmounted and reusable,
which is what makes a loop over candidates legal at all. So the change is one
function and one call site; the only real use of ROOTDEV was `schfs_kmount()`.

Order is preference, not confidence: a RAMDISK_ROOT build wins outright, then
USB, then IDE 1, then IDE 0. USB before the fixed disks because a stick that is
plugged in was plugged in on purpose. iderw() panics on an absent drive rather
than failing, so each candidate is checked with ide_disk_present() /
usb_storage_present() first -- which is what those predicates are for.

Verified with **no IDE disk attached at all**: boots, mounts the stick, writes
a file, and the file is still there on the next boot.

    [    0.000021] root: USB disk (device 3)

And when nothing matches, it names what it looked at, because "no root
filesystem" with no list is the least useful thing a kernel can say at the one
moment somebody needs to know which disk it expected:

    root: no SchFS volume on any candidate device. Looked at:
      device 3, USB disk: not present
      device 1, IDE disk 1: not present
      device 0, IDE disk 0: present, but no SchFS on it

**That message is also how dmesg turned out to be broken**, because it did not
appear in `dmesg` and should have. `dmesg` printed *nothing at all*, on a
system whose boot banner says "or dmesg once you are in" and whose entire
quiet-boot design is "route the detail into the kernel log and say how to read
it". The log was there the whole time -- `cat /proc/kmsg` has always worked --
but the one command anybody would reach for could not see it.

Two separate faults, each alone enough:

  - **sys_syslog() was `return 0`.** dmesg does not read /proc/kmsg; it calls
    klogctl(10) for the buffer size and klogctl(3) to read. 0 to the first one
    means "the log is zero bytes", and a stub that answers 0 is
    indistinguishable from a machine that logged nothing. Implemented for the
    actions that mean something here; the rest return -EINVAL rather than 0,
    because a console log level this kernel does not have is not a request that
    succeeded.

  - **With that fixed, dmesg was still empty.** It parses every line with
    `sscanf(msg, "<%u>[%llu.%llu] %n", ...)` and silently drops anything that
    does not match. The ring's `[     0.00] text` already matches everything
    after the priority -- scanf skips the leading spaces -- so the only missing
    thing was the `<6>`. klog_render_syslog() adds it on the way out rather
    than storing it: the ring is also what a person reads with `cat
    /proc/kmsg` and what PSOGM points at after a crash, and an ABI detail
    belongs at the boundary that has the ABI.

Also: the first version of the no-root diagnostic printed

    %-11s device 1596400

because cprintf() has no field-width specifier -- it prints "%-11s" literally
and then reads the next argument for the %d. Plain %s now, with the note.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-22 01:24:34 +02:00
commit 7e88cea151
6 changed files with 307 additions and 21 deletions

View file

@ -14,6 +14,7 @@
#include "posix.h"
#include "uaccess.h"
#include "errno.h"
#include "klog.h" /* KLOG_BYTES, for syslog(2) action 10 */
extern int linux_syscall_map[];
extern int linux_syscall_map_size;
@ -126,8 +127,71 @@ sys_uname(void)
// socket/bind/listen/accept/connect live in sys_net.c now that they do
// something.
// syslog: kernel logging facility — no-op for user processes.
addr_t sys_syslog(void) { return 0; }
// syslog(2) -- what `dmesg` actually calls.
//
// This returned 0 for every action, and 0 to action 10 means "the log buffer
// is zero bytes". So `dmesg` printed nothing, on a system whose boot banner
// says *"or dmesg once you are in"* and whose entire quiet-boot design is
// "put the detail in the kernel log and tell them how to read it". The detail
// was there the whole time -- `cat /proc/kmsg` has always worked -- but the
// one command anybody would reach for could not see it.
//
// dmesg does not read /proc/kmsg. It calls klogctl(10) for the buffer size and
// klogctl(3) to read, which is this syscall, and a stub that answers 0 is
// indistinguishable from a machine that logged nothing.
//
// Only the actions that mean something here are implemented. The rest say so
// rather than returning 0: a console log level this kernel does not have is
// not a request that succeeded.
#define SYSLOG_CLOSE 0
#define SYSLOG_OPEN 1
#define SYSLOG_READ 2
#define SYSLOG_READ_ALL 3
#define SYSLOG_CLEAR 5
#define SYSLOG_SIZE_UNREAD 9
#define SYSLOG_SIZE_BUFFER 10
addr_t sys_syslog(void)
{
int type, len;
addr_t bufaddr;
argint(0, &type);
argaddr(1, &bufaddr);
argint(2, &len);
switch (type) {
case SYSLOG_CLOSE:
case SYSLOG_OPEN:
return 0; // genuinely nothing to do, as on Linux
case SYSLOG_SIZE_BUFFER:
return KLOG_BYTES;
case SYSLOG_SIZE_UNREAD:
return (addr_t)klog_len();
case SYSLOG_READ_ALL: {
char *dst;
if (len < 0)
return -EINVAL;
if (len == 0 || klog_len() == 0)
return 0;
if (argptr(1, &dst, len) < 0)
return -EFAULT;
return (addr_t)klog_render_syslog(dst, len);
}
// Reading destructively needs a per-reader cursor the ring does not carry,
// and clearing needs the ring to forget -- which is the one thing it exists
// not to do, since its whole purpose is surviving the kernel that wrote it.
case SYSLOG_READ:
case SYSLOG_CLEAR:
default:
return -EINVAL;
}
}
// getrandom: fill buffer with pseudo-random bytes.
addr_t sys_getrandom(void)