hybrid: the driver is killed, and the driver comes back

H2 of docs/plan/hybrid.md -- the milestone the plan itself calls the one
that proves the whole idea, and the one that cannot be skipped.

    # cat /proc/schinit
    1 4 11 os.schos.vgpud
    # kill 4
    schinitd: restarting os.schos.vgpud
    vgpud: claimed
    vgpud: pid 8 drew a test pattern from userspace

The test pattern ends in a twelve-block tally of the drawing process's
pid, because a second run that redraws an identical picture is
indistinguishable from a first run that never stopped. Read off the
virtio-gpu scanout across four generations it says 4, 8, 10, 12, and the
DMA arena hands back the same physical address every time.

What it took:

* A halt the kernel can apply to a device it does not understand.
  Clearing PCI_CMD_BUS_MASTER is the only one there is, and it has to
  happen before the DMA goes back to the arena -- a dead driver's device
  keeps reading a framebuffer the kernel is about to give to somebody
  else. Claim sets the bit, release clears it; pcitest shows it in a bm
  column, with a third state so a failed read is never printed as off.

* A refusal. vgpu_release() asks vga_fb_restore() whether there is a
  framebuffer to put the console back on, and declines to hand over the
  device if there is not. The rule that the kernel keeps a minimal
  driver for everything on the path to a shell is worth writing down
  only if something enforces it.

* The DMA arena not being owned by two allocators at once. This is the
  bug that stopped H2: freevm() frees every mapped page below PHYSTOP
  and the arena is the top 16 MB of exactly that range, so a DMA block
  mapped into a driver went onto the page allocator's free list when the
  driver died, while pciuser_release_all() handed the same pages back to
  the arena. The restarted vgpud asked for its framebuffer, got pages
  kalloc() had already given out -- including its own page tables -- and
  dma_alloc()'s zeroing wiped them, so it died inside the ioctl on the
  return from a syscall whose stack had stopped existing. do_dma() now
  records a VMA with no_free set, the way shared memory does.

* One exit status. KeepAlive must restart a driver that crashed and must
  not restart one that has looked at the machine and found its device
  absent: on hardware with no virtio-gpu that was fifteen spawns in
  forty-five seconds, each printing a line to the console, for ever.
  SCHINIT_EXIT_NORESTART is 78, sysexits.h's EX_CONFIG. It is not a new
  manifest key -- the wait status has always travelled from PID 1 to the
  supervisor, and note_exit() simply stopped discarding it.

The milestone's third clause, "the compositor reattaches", is not done
and is not claimed: there is no compositor running. That is recorded in
the plan as a Schcom milestone rather than counted here.

Closes the register row "A released PCI device" in docs/plan/1.0.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-14 00:05:43 +02:00
commit d1f50c4da3
15 changed files with 442 additions and 40 deletions

View file

@ -537,7 +537,21 @@ vgpu_release(struct pci_dev *d)
if (!g)
return -1;
vga_fb_restore();
// The rule from docs/plan/hybrid.md, enforced rather than described: **the
// kernel keeps a minimal driver for everything on the path to a shell.** If
// there is no framebuffer to fall back to, this device is the only screen the
// machine has, and handing it to a process that might crash would make a
// failed driver indistinguishable from a dead machine.
//
// Refusing here is what lets the userspace driver be started unconditionally
// at boot: on hardware where it is safe it takes the GPU, and on hardware
// where it is not it is told no and says so, rather than each machine needing
// to be configured for its own display topology.
if (!vga_fb_restore()) {
cprintf("virtio-gpu: refusing to release -- it is the only display, and "
"there is no framebuffer to fall back to\n");
return -1;
}
// Status 0 is the virtio reset. The spec requires a driver to wait for the
// device to acknowledge by reading the register back as zero.