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>
Every driver reached its registers with P2V(bar.base), which assumes the
BAR sits inside the 0-4 GB the direct map covers. Under SeaBIOS it always
does. Under OVMF it does not: firmware may place a 64-bit BAR anywhere,
and it puts virtio-gpu's at about 768 GB. P2V produced an address with no
translation behind it, so the driver's first register write took a page
fault, then a double fault, then a triple fault and a reboot loop --
which, coming from a driver bind, reads as broken hardware rather than a
missing mapping.
ioremap() carries each region on a 1 GB page in PDPT entries 4-511, which
were unused: the direct map occupies 0-3, and kpml4[0], kpml4[KERNBASE]
and every process's PML4 all share that one table, so a mapping appears
in every address space at once with no page table to allocate. The pages
are cache-disabled and write-through for the same reason the top GB of
the direct map is -- these are registers, and a write sitting in a cache
line is a write the device never sees.
A physical address below 4 GB returns the direct-map address unchanged,
so the BIOS path, where every BAR is low, is byte for byte what it was.
virtio-gpu now initialises under OVMF (1280x800, queue 64) instead of
triple faulting. e1000 and xhci had the identical latent bug; xhci was
already refusing to bind above 4 GB with a comment saying the mapping did
not exist yet, and now it does.
BIOS unchanged: bootcheck 108 [ok] with -Fb -Tty -Usb -Sock -Evdev -Ps,
e1000 and xhci both binding.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An x86-64 operating system built from xv6, now largely rewritten: SMP,
a copy-on-write root filesystem (SchFS), PCI/USB/virtio drivers, a TTF
rasteriser, and a Linux-numbered syscall ABI.
No history before this point -- the tree was never under version control.
This commit exists so the rename that follows has something to undo to.
