Every page table SchOS built -- the loader's, which the kernel starts on
and the other CPUs start through, and the kernel's own direct map and
device window -- mapped memory in 1 GB pages. Intel's desktop CPUs
before Haswell do not have them, and there the PS bit in a PDPT entry is
reserved: the first access after the switch is a page fault that cannot
be handled either. An HP all-in-one with an Ivy Bridge i3 showed "Placing
and starting the kernel" and reset.
Both now check CPUID 0x80000001 EDX bit 26. Without it the loader maps
the low 4 GB through four page directories of 2 MB pages, placed below
the kernel where nothing reuses them, and keeps the staged kernel
segments below 4 GB; the kernel gives each gigabyte of its direct map
and of ioremap() a page directory of its own.
Neither KVM nor QEMU's emulator enforces the reserved bit, so the fault
itself could not be reproduced here. With the fallback forced on, the
kernel boots at 2 and 8 GB, both CPUs start, and evtest passes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
An ASUS TUF A15 booted with its internal keyboard dead and a USB one
fine. These AMD laptops' firmware describes IRQ 1's polarity wrongly --
Linux keeps a quirk list -- and an edge line programmed the wrong way
up never fires: the controller holds its byte, and only the interrupt
that never comes would read it.
irq_watch() lets a driver say how to ask its device whether something
is waiting. The poller asks every tick; 50 ms of waiting with nothing
delivered turns the line's polarity over and drains the device, which
re-arms the edge, and if it still says nothing the line is polled.
Both are announced. The keyboard and the PS/2 mouse are watched.
ISA lines now also take their mode from the MADT's override entries,
which were parsed and never read.
Tested in QEMU, which ignores polarity on edge lines, with the keyboard
line masked: the first key turns it over and typing works; masked again
after the flip, it is polled and typing still works.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The staged segments were copied home after ExitBootServices by the
loader itself -- on code, a stack and a copy list the firmware had
placed wherever it liked. On an HP all-in-one some of that was in the
kernel's range: "Placing the kernel", then a triple fault and a reset.
The copy and the jump now run from one page below the kernel's lowest
address, allocated as loader code before the firmware exits: a short
position-independent routine, the copy list, and a stack. It switches
to the loader's page tables and its own stack before copying anything.
Called sysv_abi, because UEFI code is the Microsoft convention and the
first try loaded the framebuffer address into rsp.
The framebuffer address handed over in rbx is 64-bit now too; the
kernel already read the full one from the hand-off block.
Also write.sh: writes schos.iso to a USB stick, after showing the
device and asking for its name to be typed back; refuses partitions,
the system disk and non-removable disks; reads the result back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The set libwayland's event loop is made of, in kernel/sys/sys_event.c:
four kinds of descriptor with no inode, FD_EVENT, that read() drains
and poll() reports on. They were table entries returning ENOSYS that
read as done.
epoll registers (descriptor, file) pairs, so a closed descriptor
leaves the set; level- and edge-triggered, EPOLLONESHOT. Waiting is
poll()'s, a tick at a time. The old eventfd and signalfd numbers (284,
282) were aliased to the new calls and read flags from a garbage
register; they are their own entries now, with epoll_create and
epoll_pwait.
cmd/evtest checks each, then all four in one set. The plans are
brought up to date: everything Wayland was waiting on is built except
setsockopt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
A program that names an interpreter in PT_INTERP gets it loaded too, at
the bottom of the mmap area, and started instead -- with AT_PHDR,
AT_PHENT, AT_PHNUM, AT_BASE and AT_ENTRY to find the program by. ET_DYN
images are placed at a base: the interpreter there, a PIE program where
a fixed one would go. Static musl programs get AT_PHDR now as well,
which is how musl finds their TLS template.
mmap(MAP_FIXED) of a file handed back zeroed pages whatever the
descriptor said, and kept no record of them, so fork() did not copy
them. A dynamic linker maps every library segment after the first that
way. Fixed mappings now read the file and are recorded wherever no
mapping already covers them.
musl is built shared as well as static, and libc.so ships as
/lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 -- libc and loader in one file. Every port
still links -static on purpose.
cmd/dynhello is the test: against libc.so and a library of its own,
checking TLS, the heap, and a fork whose child still has both.
mprotect is accepted and not enforced yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
sigsend() ended a process for a default-fatal signal (SIGUSR1, SIGTERM,
SIGINT...) on arrival, whatever its signal mask said. Blocking is
exactly the promise that it will not: the signal waits until it is
unblocked, or until the program takes it some other way -- which is
what signalfd is, and how this was found.
A blocked signal is now only made pending. If it is later unblocked
while still pending, deliver_signals() applies the default action
then. SIGKILL cannot be blocked, as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
From 1 MB the 34 MB kernel ran across 8 MB, where OVMF keeps ACPI NVS
memory that outlives the firmware -- so it was overwritten on every
boot, after ExitBootServices. Firmware leaves its leftovers low; above
16 MB is where a machine is most reliably empty.
KERNPHYS in memlayout.h, and kernel.ld agreeing with it. Nothing else
named the old address. Under OVMF the range is now only boot-services
memory: staged, copied home after the firmware exits, no warning. Boots
as a CD and as a USB disk, 1 and 4 CPUs.
The 15 MB below the kernel is not given to the page allocator yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The kernel goes at fixed physical addresses, 1 MB to about 34 MB with
the RAM disk inside it. When AllocatePages refused part of that, the
loader said "could not reserve" and read the kernel there anyway -- over
the firmware's own memory, with the firmware still running on it. An HP
all-in-one from 2012 froze at the start of the loading bar.
Now every free page of the range is claimed first. A segment wholly on
claimed pages is read straight home; one that is not is read into a
buffer elsewhere and copied home after ExitBootServices, when
boot-services memory is ours. Memory under the kernel that outlives
the firmware (ACPI NVS, runtime services) is named, and so is the loader
or its stack sitting in the range.
Segments are read a megabyte at a time, so the bar moves through the
RAM disk and shows where a machine stopped.
Under OVMF the data segment (over ACPI NVS and boot-services data at
8 MB) is now staged, and it boots both as a CD and as a USB disk.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
From a clean tree the first make failed with "no rule to make target
build/lwip/core/init.o": a pattern rule is only used when its
prerequisite exists or can be made, and before the unpack lwIP's .c
files were neither. A second make worked, which is why it went unseen.
The unpack now claims the .c files. And sysroot-install waits for it,
because its own make -C ports unpacked lwIP too, and two unzips under
-j collided.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
-isohybrid-gpt-basdat does nothing without an MBR template, so the ISO
had no partition table at all: written to a stick, it was a CD
filesystem at sector 0. AMI on a B550 (and OVMF) read El Torito off any
block device and booted it anyway. An HP all-in-one from 2012 looks for
an EFI system partition on a USB disk, as the spec says to, found none,
and listed the stick under Legacy only.
The FAT image now goes in a second time as MBR partition 2, type 0xEF,
and is FAT16 by cluster count rather than FAT12, the type old firmware
reads worst. Booted under OVMF both as a CD and as a USB disk. The ISO
also rebuilds when mkiso.sh changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
- schinit, schinitd and vgpud build every message from pieces, one
write() each, so a job starting on another CPU landed mid-line:
"schinitd: starting vgpud: os.schos.resolvconfno virtio-gpu on this
machine". They now collect a line and write it at the newline;
resolvconf's verbose line is one write with its prefix.
- The ACPI SCI registers IRQ_QUIET. A desktop's SCI never fires, and the
poller took two seconds of silence for a misrouted line ("irq 9:
nothing has arrived on it") and called the handler every tick. A line
is only exempt while every handler on it is quiet.
- The loader claims each segment from where the last one's claim ended,
so two segments sharing a page no longer ask for it twice. When a
claim is still refused, it names the memory-map entries in the way.
- Stale divesymlink() declaration gone; the kernel.md struct table
re-measured (inode, buf and file pools grow from slabs now).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Home:
- The hero stands on a light from the upper left and a pool of the
accent, mixed from Niveus tokens so it follows the theme. The mark sits
in an .nv-tile key under a slogan: "Every layer its own -- from the
first instruction to the last pixel."
- New section headings: "A teaching kernel that outgrew its lessons",
"Measured, not marketed", "One ISO. One stick. Your disks untouched."
- A Wallpapers section with the four new ones, each downloadable as a
4K JPEG or as SVG. The four-card grids are two across, so none is left
alone on its row.
Docs reader:
- An index filter, a breadcrumb with reading time and source path,
code blocks framed with a language strip and a Copy key, previous and
next keys at the foot, a reading-progress hairline, and the contents
entry lit for the section on screen.
- The index lists the documents it was missing: scheduler, FAT, audio,
LDLS, debugging and the hardware report.
- On a phone the page is no longer wider than the screen (a pre block
was sizing the grid's auto column), and the index folds away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
tools/wallpapers.py writes them from the Shift geometry, so they follow
the mark: Graphite (the default), Strata, Porcelain (light) and Dial.
Each is a 3840x2160 SVG with a JPEG render beside it. JPEG is the right
format for gradients under grain, and the branding README now says why
this is the one exception to its no-JPEG rule.
Removed: wallpaper1 (drawn flat, and built on the retired Guru mark),
the site's unused copy of it, and the two superseded wordmark PNGs. The
root README showed one of those, and now shows Graphite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Three fixes for real machines that broke at any resolution but 800x600:
- kmain() took the loader's framebuffer address as uint32, and
vga_fb_init() re-published the scanout from that and the 16-bit VBE
block. An aperture above 4 GB moved the console onto the wrong memory
right after the vga: line. Both now use the loader's 64-bit display
block, mapped with ioremap().
- The loader mirrored onto the console splitter's GOP, which forwards to
the primary itself, and onto GOPs that share the primary's aperture.
After a mode change that rewrote the screen over itself with another
mode's stride. Handles without a device path and overlapping apertures
are skipped, and a mode change re-matches the remaining mirrors.
- A mode whose reported size, stride or aperture does not add up after
SetMode is refused, and the loader returns to the previous one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The marks are now drawn the way Niveus draws its keys: one light from the
upper left, gloss on the faces that catch it, a specular line on the edges
that face it, and soft contact shadows.
- Shift: shaded slabs, each casting onto the one below. shift-mask.svg is
untouched, so the kernel's logo.h coverage mask is unchanged.
- Uberblock: bevelled slots in a groove; the newest slot and the root glow.
- USB stick: moulded body, steel connector, a lit activity LED.
- Pride flag: cloth folds and a hem over the flag's own colours.
The pages use the components the new Niveus added: both terminals are
.nv-window frames, the origin and first-boot sequences are .nv-steps, the
numbers are a .nv-stat-group, and each feature card has an .nv-tile glyph.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The vendored copy of Niveus, the site's design system, brought up to
the current upstream (github.com/Nexoniarz/Niveus, 2026-10-18). The
tree under docs/Website/niveus is upstream's byte for byte.
.gitattributes says `* text eol=lf` and listed the binary types it
knew, and woff2 was not one of them: Niveus's InstrumentSans-Italic
had a CR LF pair in its compressed data, and committing it turned that
into LF and the font into garbage. woff, woff2, otf, ico, gif, webp,
pdf and wasm are binary now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Sixty-five headers sat side by side in include/, so `#include "irq.h"`
said nothing about where irq.h was or what it belonged to, and errno.h,
stat.h and fcntl.h at the top shadowed the system's for any host tool
built with -I./include. They are in folders now -- arch/ core/ fs/
dev/ gfx/ net/ uapi/ (and ldls/ for the Linux driver layer) -- and
every include names the folder, as Linux's do: "core/proc.h".
Done mechanically and checked the hard way: the kernel built from this
tree disassembles identically to the one built from the tree before
it. The full image boots, and userland is the same set of programs.
Paths in docs and comments follow; docs/guides/layout.md has a table
of what is where, and tools/fix-includes.py rewrites old-style
includes from the folders in the tree, for code written before this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Nothing ever saved the FPU and SSE registers on a context switch.
musl's memcpy, the compiler's struct copies and any arithmetic on
doubles keep live values in %xmm, so two processes sharing a CPU wrote
over each other's: two shells counting in a loop on one processor took
a NULL+8 page fault within seconds, at a different rip every time. It
reproduces on kernels from before this week too -- it had always been
there, and every crash nobody could explain was a candidate.
sched() now fxsaves the process leaving the CPU and scheduler()
fxrstors the one arriving. A new process starts from the ABI's state
(FCW 0x37F, MXCSR 0x1F80), fork copies the parent's live registers,
exec resets them, and a signal handler's are put back by rt_sigreturn
so the interrupted code finds what it had.
The kernel was free to use %xmm too -- GCC vectorised struct copies
and memset into 153 instructions of it -- so an interrupt could
clobber the registers of the program it interrupted with no switch at
all. Kernel, lwIP and uACPI objects are built -mgeneral-regs-only now
and the image has none; cmd/ keeps SSE.
Checked under QEMU: three concurrent loops three times over, on 1 CPU
and on 4, no faults; before, every run faulted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The scheduler was xv6's round-robin: run everything RUNNABLE in slot
order and yield on every timer tick. Slot order is not fairness, a
process alone on a CPU paid a full context switch a hundred times a
second to be handed straight back to itself, and there was no way to
say that one thing mattered more than another.
Every process now carries vruntime, the CPU time it has used divided
by its weight, and the scheduler runs the runnable process with the
smallest. Fairness and interactivity both fall out of that one rule;
nice is a weight, 1.25x per level as UNIX has always had it. A slice
is 20 ms shared among the runnable processes, never below 2 ms, and
the timer tick preempts only once it is spent. A process waking from
a long sleep is brought up to min_vruntime less one period, so it is
scheduled promptly without being owed everything it slept through;
fork inherits vruntime, so forking does not reset a debt.
getpriority/setpriority are real, with Linux's offset of 20 on the
return; /proc/<pid>/schedstat and the ctxt_switches lines of status
report what the scheduler did. docs/architecture/scheduler.md has the
reasoning, including why the run queue is still a scan of ptable.
This was written in an earlier session and left uncommitted. Finished
here: a signal waking a sleeper goes through the same vruntime floor
as wakeup() does, and sched_yield() yields -- it returned 0 doing
nothing, harmless while every tick was a yield and a spin of a whole
slice once ticks stopped being one.
Checked under QEMU on 1 and 4 CPUs: a nice 10 loop beside a nice 0
one gets about a tenth of a shared CPU, and a command typed meanwhile
answers in 26 ms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Every page of RAM went onto the free list at boot, which means writing
each one -- a link, and kfree()'s 4 KB of junk -- before the first
process ran: 64 GB of memset on a 64 GB machine to say it was free.
Memory nobody has used yet is kept as a cursor and an end per region
now, and kalloc() takes from those once the list of given-back pages
is empty. A page is first touched by whoever asked for it.
That makes the cap on RAM cheap to raise, and PHYSTOP_MAX goes from 64
to 256 GB, which still leaves 248 GB of the kernel PDPT for device
windows. MEMREGION_MAX goes from 32 to 64 for the firmware maps that
cut RAM into many pieces.
kalloc_free_bytes() walked the whole free list under the allocator's
lock -- two million links on 8 GB, every second top or fastfetch was
running, with every CPU that wanted a page waiting behind it. It reads
a counter now. And the buffer cache, which keeps what it grows to, is
reported as Buffers in /proc/meminfo and sysinfo(2) rather than as
memory used by nothing.
Checked under QEMU at 1, 2 and 6 GB: MemFree right, zsh splitting
200000 words, fork loops, a 74 MB write.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The fixed tables that a bigger machine than the one they were written
on reaches first, each raised to where it costs little:
NPCI 64 -> 256 a desktop with cards and Thunderbolt passes 64,
and the devices past it -- often the disk or
NIC last in bus order -- were ignored; 44 KB
NSOCK 32 -> 128 Unix sockets, which a desktop session uses by
the dozen; 4.9 KB each, 470 KB in all
NDEVICE 32 -> 128 120 bytes each
NIFDEV 16 -> 64 one dock is a hub, Ethernet, audio and a card
reader at two or three interfaces apiece
NETIF_MAX 4 -> 8
Device names took one digit and clamped there, so the tenth device of
a kind and every one after it was named "...9". Two digits now.
Checked under QEMU with two bridges of test devices: 68 functions,
all in lspci, /proc/pci and /sys/bus/pci.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
NCPU was 16, under what a desktop has today. 64 costs 48 more TSS
I/O bitmaps and scheduler stacks, about 800 KB of BSS. Past 254 the
APIC would need x2APIC mode, which is a separate change.
With more than 16 there were two other ceilings. sched_getaffinity
wrote "CPU 0" and returned 0, and musl clears every byte past the
count returned -- so the mask came back empty and nproc, make -j and
sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN) all said 1, on any machine. It returns
the mask of processors that started, and its size, now. And /proc
rendered every file into 2 KB, which /proc/cpuinfo ran out of at the
eighteenth processor without a word; /proc/pci, /proc/interrupts and
/proc/mounts were each one bigger machine from the same cut. There is
one 64 KB buffer for it now behind a sleeplock, since there is no
allocator for contiguous pages, and the generators that write raw
are given the real capacity instead of a constant.
Checked under QEMU with -smp 24: nproc 24, /proc/cpuinfo whole.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The inode table was NINODE (200) entries, searched end to end on every
iget(), and a panic -- "iget: no inodes" -- when all of them were held.
Held means open, a cwd, a running binary or a directory mid-walk, so a
few busy processes reached it. iget() now finds an inode through a hash
on (dev, inum), takes a free one from a list, and makes more from a
slab cache once the NINODE in the image are all in use.
The open-file table had the same shape, NFILE (512) and then ENFILE,
and gets the same treatment: a free list, and the slab past NFILE.
/proc/fsstat's peaks now read against how many exist.
getrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE) said unlimited, which musl turns into
sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX) == -1, after which zsh believed it had no
descriptors and `exec {fd}<file` failed on the first one. It reports
NOFILE now. And a comment in sys_fs.c held a "*/" that ended it early.
Checked under QEMU: six processes holding 115 files each, 713 open
descriptions and 341 inodes at once, all back to the baseline after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The cache was NBUF buffers, 1 MB, on every machine: enough for one with
tens of megabytes and nothing on one with gigabytes, which re-read the
same directory and binary blocks off the disk for every command. It
still starts as those 256 in the kernel image, and a miss with every
buffer busy now makes a new one rather than evicting, up to 1/32 of RAM
or 256 MB. Growing on demand means nothing is spent that is not used,
and binit() needs nothing from the page allocator.
Lookups go through a hash on (dev, blockno) instead of walking the LRU
list, and bflush() walks a creation-order list with an unlocked filter
first, so neither costs more at 65536 buffers than it did at 256.
struct buf's data is a pointer to its own page now; the drivers copy
through their own DMA buffers, so where it sits does not matter.
On a 2 GB QEMU guest: a 40 MB file read back in 0.89 s instead of 1.83,
the big binaries in 0.17 s instead of 0.26. /proc/fsstat shows the
cache as buf_cached now / most.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
exec took 32 arguments and 64 environment variables, in fixed arrays,
so a glob over more than 31 files failed with E2BIG. It now reads the
caller's argv and envp where they are, through the uaccess helpers and
a bounce page -- a second thread rewriting the array after a check
cannot slip a kernel address in -- and sizes the new stack to fit
them. The limits are Linux's: ARG_MAX, 2 MB of strings and pointers,
and 128 KB for any one string (USER_STR_MAX follows it).
Every mmap took one of a process's 256 VMA slots, and zsh takes one per
16 KB heap block, so `x=($(<file))` over 30000 words ran out after 4 MB
of heap and exited 1 without a word. Neighbouring anonymous mappings
now share a record, as Linux merges them -- the bump allocator puts
each new one where the last ended -- and munmap trims or splits it.
Partial unmaps of device or segment mappings are refused with EINVAL
instead of kfree()ing pages that are not the process's, and a failed
allocation half way through a mapping no longer leaks what it had.
Checked under QEMU: touch over 3000 names, /bin/echo with 50000
arguments, E2BIG past 2 MB, zsh splitting 100000 words, fork loops.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
hwreport writes one folder to the first read-write FAT mount, or mounts
the first USB stick that takes vfat itself and unmounts it afterwards:
summary.txt (machine, firmware, CPU, memory, every PCI and USB device
with its driver or "-- no driver"), dmesg.txt, lspci.txt in the shape of
lspci -nnk -xxx, lsusb.txt, dmi.txt, memmap.txt, the ACPI tables as raw
.dat files iasl -d reads, and copies of /proc. Serials, the UUID and the
MSDM/SLIC tables (a Windows licence key) are left out.
It reads /sys, which is new: sysfs at Linux's paths and in Linux's
formats -- /sys/bus/pci/devices with uevent, config and resource,
/sys/bus/usb/devices, /sys/firmware/acpi/tables, dmi/tables, memmap
and efi, /sys/class/dmi/id. toybox's lspci and lsusb work unmodified
against it. The USB core now keeps a table of attached devices for it.
The machine's name comes from SMBIOS (kernel/dev/dmi.c). The UEFI loader
hands over the entry point from the configuration table, the kernel
falls back to the 0xF0000 scan, and the log gets Linux's "DMI:" line.
Two bugs found on the way:
- The loader handed over at most 40 memory-map entries, in firmware
order. A laptop's UEFI map is 60-150 descriptors with RAM above 4 GB
listed last, so that is what was dropped. The entries now have their
own area at 0x31000 with room for 256, are sorted before merging, and
the kernel's 32 usable regions keep the largest when there are more.
- MemTotal and sysinfo's totalram were PHYSTOP, an address, which counts
the PCI hole: a 6 GB machine reported 8. Now the usable RAM, summed.
usb.ids moves to /usr/share/hwdata, where lsusb looks for it, and
pci.ids joins it (`make pci-ids`, BSD-3-Clause like usb.ids).
Checked under QEMU q35: the report written to a FAT32 stick, fsck.fat
clean, DSDT.dat disassembled by iasl on the host, lspci -k and lsusb
showing names, 6 GB of RAM seen as 6137 MB.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Transaction groups commit from a schfsd thread every 5 seconds, on sync
and fsync, on unmount and shutdown, and early when freed-but-pending
blocks crowd the free ones -- the contract ext4 and ZFS have. A crash
still lands on the last group whole, and loses at most those seconds.
Committing before every write(2) returned cost two cache flushes and an
uberblock a call: 4 KB writes go from 2.8 to 6.6 MB/s on AHCI, and from
66 KB/s to 3.9 MB/s on QEMU's IDE disk.
Filling the disk made the root volume unmountable, on the last commit
as well: a tree update that ran out of blocks halfway was published by
the next commit. 1% of the volume (1 to 64 MiB) is now a metadata
reserve, as btrfs and ZFS keep one; data stops at it with ENOSPC as a
short write, new names at half of it, and deletes may use the rest. A
write that runs out part way records what it wrote in the inode rather
than leaving blocks past an end of file nothing moved.
Deleting a large file goes in 4 MiB steps from the end with a commit
allowed between them, as ext4 restarts its transaction through a long
truncate. Deleting 80 MB on a full disk ran out of room halfway and
leaked the rest.
The VFS's dirunlink called the object layer's whole unlink, which freed
the object with its last name, so a file removed while open lost its
data under the reader. It removes the name only now, and the object is
freed on the last iput. An object still open when the machine went down
is found by the mount's space scan and freed, like ext4's orphan list.
The allocation bitmap has a second level of pointer pages, so the mount
ceiling is 64 TiB instead of 64 GiB, and the freed-this-group bitmap
has pages only where frees happened: a 1 TiB volume takes 32 MiB.
A freed block written after the newest snapshot is reused at once
(ZFS's birth-time rule, so bfree carries the block's generation); only
older ones are kept while a snapshot exists. Deleting one snapshot no
longer stops retaining for the others, which let their blocks be
handed out again.
Checked under QEMU: crash after sync, after 8 s and within 5 s; fill to
ENOSPC, rm, remount; unlink while open; an orphan freed at the next
mount; a 1 TiB volume. schfs-check passes, with a new test for the
snapshot rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
NBLKDEV was 16 for every disk and partition together, which a laptop's
NVMe drive with its eight partitions and a USB stick come close to. The
mount table held 8, SchFS 4 volumes and 4 snapshots, FAT 4 volumes.
Now 32, 32, 16, 8 and 8; the device numbers still fit between the ones
already fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Every path component was copied into a DIRSIZ buffer and every path
into a MAXPATH one, so names were cut at 29 bytes and paths at 127
without an error. Two names sharing their first 29 bytes opened the
same file, on SchFS and FAT alike, though both hold 255.
VFS_NAME_MAX (255) and VFS_PATH_MAX (4096) are the limits now, and
anything longer is ENAMETOOLONG. namex_from() takes its path buffers
from kalloc(), a page each, rather than putting two of them on an 8 KB
kernel stack. The v1 format still stores DIRSIZ bytes, and refuses a
longer name instead of matching on its first 30.
Checked: 255-byte names on SchFS and FAT (fsck.fat clean, and the FAT
name answers to its uppercase form), 256 refused, a 200-byte path and a
link to it, and no pages lost over 700 lookups through links.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
kd_write() went through bread(), so every block a write allocated was
read from the disk first and then replaced whole. That was a quarter of
the disk operations of a SchFS write. bgetblk() is bread() without the
read, as Linux's getblk() is.
1 MB on AHCI under QEMU: 2.0 -> 2.8 MB/s in 4 KB writes, 4.5 -> 5.6
MB/s in 64 KB ones. 3 MB of random data written and copied through the
cache's evictions reads back with the same md5.
The 63 KB/s seen earlier is the legacy IDE driver on QEMU's default
machine, at about 10 ms per emulated PIO write; the same disk on AHCI
(q35) is 40 times faster.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Symlinks are followed in namex_from() now, in the middle of a path as
well as at the end, and a relative target resolves from the directory
that holds the link rather than from the caller's cwd. `ln -s f d1/s;
cat d1/s` said "Symbolic link loop" because it looked for ./f. A loop is
ELOOP after 40 links, a dangling link ENOENT, and open(O_CREAT) through
a link to a file opens the file. divesymlink() is gone.
mknod from a Linux program passes (mode, dev) where the native call
passes (major, minor), and was read as the native one: `mknod n c 1 2`
made node 432,258, and mkfifo made a character device. Both are decoded
now; a FIFO is EPERM, and an existing name is EEXIST.
/proc/mounts listed devtmpfs twice: once from a fixed line and once
from the mount table. The fixed line is gone, and mount_add() refuses
a filesystem mounted on its own root, which is where a second devtmpfs
mount lands. A read-only FAT mount says ro.
/proc/partitions exists, in Linux's format, and /proc/filesystems lists
vfat.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The filesystem every other system can read: a USB stick, an SD card, the
EFI system partition. It is here first for the hardware report, which has
to leave a machine on something that can be read on another one.
mount -t vfat /dev/usb0p1 /mnt (msdos and fat work too; -o ro)
Written from Microsoft's specification, and matched to Linux vfat where
the specification leaves a choice: 8.3 names with the NT lowercase bits,
long-name entries otherwise, Linux's alias rule (REPORTS, then BIGNUM~1),
case-insensitive lookup, UTC times, the boot-sector dirty bit, every FAT
copy and FSInfo kept up to date. It uses its own sector cache over the
new blkdev_xfer, since a partition need not be a whole number of 4 KB
blocks, and every operation that changes something reaches the disk
before it returns. Inode numbers come from the entry position, or the
first cluster for a directory, plus a small table for entries that moved.
Around it:
- /dev lists every disk and partition the block layer found (major 8,
minor = block device), and raw reads and writes on them go by sector.
- The ESP and MBR FAT partitions are registered, typed so the root probe
passes over them. MBR entries with a bad status byte are skipped, so a
superfloppy's boot code is not read as a partition table.
- statfs, sync, fsync, umount (EBUSY while in use), shutdown, reboot and
the power button all know about FAT.
- create undoes and reports a failed ialloc or dirlink (ENOSPC, EINVAL,
EPERM) instead of panicking; fs_ops gains refuse_types and no_hardlinks.
- filewrite returns a short write instead of panicking on it.
- utimensat is implemented. As a stub returning 0 it made toybox touch
believe the file existed, so `touch newfile` created nothing on any
filesystem.
Tested in QEMU against mkfs.vfat images (FAT12 floppy, FAT16 on MBR,
FAT32 superfloppy and GPT ESP) by writing, renaming, deleting, filling to
ENOSPC and truncating there, then checking with fsck.fat -n and mtools on
the host: all clean, contents match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
consoleinit() put consoleread/consolewrite in devsw[1], over memread and
memwrite. Major 1 holds the whole mem major (null, zero, full, random,
urandom) and memread already sends the console's minors to the console,
so the override only broke the others: a read of /dev/zero waited for a
typed line. dd and head on either device hung, and `head -c 10 /dev/zero`
only finished because it swallowed the next command.
The console now installs just its open and close hooks. /dev/keyboard
writes are discarded, as consolewrite used to do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
"acpi: 0 PCI interrupts routed through _PRT" on an AMD board meant that
every PCIe bridge's devices are wired to the second I/O APIC, which is not
driven. It says so now, and that those devices need MSI.
"vga: framebuffer disagreement" on an NVIDIA card compared the GOP's
framebuffer against BAR0, a 16 MB register block big enough to pass for a
screen. The BAR that contains the framebuffer is preferred now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
From the first boot on real hardware: a Razer mouse's control transfer
failed with a babble, and an ITE controller's late endpoint-0 completion
was reported as an "unexpected event" during a command.
A failed control transfer left endpoint 0 halted (or, on a timeout, still
running with TRBs queued), so every request after it to that device failed
too. It is now reset or stopped and its dequeue pointer moved past what was
left on the ring. A STALL -- a device declining a request it does not
implement -- is logged only on a verbose boot.
HID interfaces without the boot subclass were turned away unless they had a
pointer. The report descriptor's keyboard page is now read too -- modifier
bits, a key array, an NKRO bitmap -- and each report rewritten into the boot
layout for the existing path. Checked with QEMU's usb-kbd forced into report
protocol: "echo Hi", Shift included, typed and ran.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
At 800x600 with the 21-pixel console cell there was not room for the logo,
the facts and the call chain above the three closing lines. The chain ran
into the footer, the footer was drawn over it, and what remained was the
tail of a trace line after "asks more." -- the "0x5d" in the photo -- with
the tops of "Call chain" underlining the line above.
The layout is measured first now; the top margin gives way, then the logo,
and the chain stops above the footer. Text in the rows the QR card shares
stops short of it rather than running underneath. The screen is flushed
unconditionally: the CPU that panicked may have stopped another halfway
through a flush.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
On the first real machine with a discrete card (an RTX 3060, 800x600 from
the UEFI GOP) the console was slow enough to photograph mid-scroll, and the
boot died on CPU 1's "cpu1: starting": CPU 0 spun 200M times on the console
lock while CPU 1 held it, scrolling, and called it a deadlock.
The framebuffer is device memory in the uncached 3-4 GB page of the direct
map. QEMU's stdvga is RAM underneath, so nothing showed there; on a card,
gfx_scroll_up's memmove read the whole screen back across the bus one byte
at a time, and every anti-aliased glyph read back each pixel it blended.
So the console now draws into a copy of the screen in RAM (vmap_alloc: kalloc
pages behind a page table of their own, since nothing needs it contiguous),
and gfx_flush() copies the changed rectangle onto the card through an
ioremap_wc() mapping -- PAT entry 4 set to write-combining on every CPU.
Flushes happen where drawing ends: a message, a terminal write, an echo, a
terminal switch. Scrolling moves eight bytes at a time instead of one.
/dev/fb0 reads and writes the card itself, as before. The early console's
fb_info now carries the physical address it always should have.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
The firmware's AML is now interpreted. uACPI 6.1.1 (MIT) is fetched by
ports/uacpi, checksum-verified, and compiled into the kernel unmodified,
the same way lwIP is. kernel/acpi/host.c is its host layer: memory,
mapping, port and PCI config I/O, time, mutexes and events that spin
before the scheduler exists, the SCI, and an "acpi" thread for the
work the SCI defers.
PCI interrupts go where the board says. pci_init() now routes every
device's INTx through the root bridge's _PRT before drivers bind. It
follows link devices' _CRS, uses a bridge's own _PRT where the namespace
has one, and swizzles through bridges that don't. Before this, INTx
waited on the 8259's line number, which is the wrong pin in APIC mode.
irq_register() takes a trigger mode rather than a level/low flag,
because q35's links and most SCIs are level, active-high. The MADT's
interrupt source overrides are now parsed, and are what places the SCI.
The power button syncs the filesystems and powers off. shutdown() and
reboot() go through the firmware's S5 and reset register first, and
only then fall back to the emulators' ports, which a real board does
not answer.
Tested under QEMU: q35 with MSI off routes xHCI to GSI 22,
level/active-high, and it takes real interrupts with nothing polled.
system_powerdown powers off q35 and i440fx (QEMU exits 0), and q35
with 4 CPUs boots from NVMe with USB hot-plug working alongside.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
A native driver written from the NVMe 1.4 base specification. It resets
the controller the firmware left running, then sets up an admin queue and
one I/O queue pair. Completion is polled, with interrupts disabled at the
queue, for the same reason AHCI polls: without AML, interrupt routing on
real hardware cannot be trusted. Each active namespace with 512-byte to
4 KB sectors and no metadata is registered as nvme<C>n<N>, the name
Linux uses, and its GPT is read like any other disk's.
Tested under QEMU q35: disk.img on NVMe as the only disk boots through
OVMF, roots on nvme0n1p2, and writes read back after sync. A
4 KB-sector namespace registers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Devices can now arrive and leave after boot. A "usbhotplug" kernel thread
handles root-port changes, which it is told about by Port Status Change
events and also checks for every quarter second. It also handles changes
behind hubs, which each hub reports on its status-change endpoint. An
unplugged device has its endpoints closed and any transfer in flight
failed. Then its drivers' disconnect hooks run, the slot is disabled and
its memory is freed. Everything behind a hub that goes goes with it. This
needed the interrupt handler to file command and endpoint-0 completions
for their waiters, so that enumeration can run while keyboards interrupt.
On real hardware: the controller is taken from the firmware through USB
Legacy Support before reset, with SMIs off. On Intel 7/8/9 series parts
the ports are switched over from EHCI, which is where firmware leaves
them.
Every interface of a device is offered to the class drivers, not just
the first, so a receiver's mouse on interface 1 gets a driver. Configure
Endpoint now copies the slot context from the controller. Before, it
rebuilt it and lost the route string and TT fields of devices behind
hubs.
HID: pointers are read in report protocol from their report descriptor.
That covers buttons, X/Y and wheel, relative or absolute, and report IDs.
Boot protocol is kept as the fallback for mice and for keyboards.
Non-pointer HID interfaces are declined rather than treated as tablets.
USB keyboards get software key repeat. Mass storage handles up to four
sticks, each unregistered from the block layer when it is pulled out,
along with its cached blocks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
/proc/interrupts on q35 said "LOSING 526" ticks: 5 s of boot with
interrupts off. Timing each step of kmain() found two waits:
- AHCI sent a COMRESET to every empty port and waited a second for a
link. DET = 0 is "no device", so only DET = 1 is worth a reset now
(after 20 ms of grace for a drive that is still spinning up).
- ideinit() read 0xFF from a bus with no IDE controller, took the BSY
bit for a busy drive, and waited out its 1 s timeout. A status of
0xFF means no controller and is answered at once.
That is every PC with SATA disks. q35 now loses 33 ticks, under the
flag; i440fx still roots on IDE and loses none.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
q35 stopped with "no root filesystem" because its disk is SATA, like
every PC since 2008, and SchOS only had IDE. And SchFS could only sit
on a whole raw device, so nothing could boot from a disk that also
carried an ESP.
- include/blkdev.h, kernel/dev/blkdev.c: a registry of block devices
found at probe time, numbered from 4. A disk's GPT (or MBR) is read
when it registers, and each partition becomes a device whose block 0
is the partition's first sector. SchFS needs no format change to live
in a partition; a Linux SchFS driver will see the same bytes on
/dev/sdX2. SchFS has its own GPT type:
47138FA9-B79C-47A6-9F7D-AC1F7F572D5E.
- AHCI driver, written from the AHCI 1.3.1 spec: BIOS handoff,
COMRESET when the link is down, IDENTIFY, 48-bit DMA read/write,
FLUSH. Completion is polled, so the root disk does not depend on
interrupt routing.
- USB sticks also register as usb0, so their partitions are found.
- The root probe tries registered devices between USB and IDE,
SchFS-typed partitions first.
- make disk / tools/posix/mkdisk.sh: a GPT image with a 64 MB ESP and
a SchFS partition, ready to dd to a stick or a disk.
Tested in QEMU q35: the old two-disk setup roots on sata1; disk.img as
the only SATA disk roots on sata0p2; disk.img as a USB stick (firmware
boots from it) roots on usb0p2. Writes survive sync in each case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
PCI drivers took their interrupt from INTERRUPT_LINE. On real hardware
that is the 8259's number, not the IOAPIC pin the device is wired to
(that is in ACPI _PRT, which needs AML), so nothing ever arrived. xHCI
is entirely interrupt-driven, so the USB keyboard and a USB root would
have hung even on a clean boot. Under QEMU the two numbers agree,
which is why it never showed.
- pci_irq_attach()/pci_irq_detach(): MSI, then MSI-X if the driver
allows it, then INTx. The handler is registered before MSI is
enabled, so no edge is lost. xHCI, e1000, r8169 and rtl8139 use it.
- Lines 24-29 are MSI vectors. The LAPIC error vector moves from 19,
which is a PCI pin on Intel chipsets, to 30. Nothing is placed at or
above vector 64 (T_SYSCALL).
- A storming line is masked and its handlers are polled instead of
being left to eat the CPU. A level line that has had a handler for 2 s
and never fired is polled every tick by a kernel thread.
Tested in QEMU q35 with the root on a USB stick: xHCI and e1000e on
MSI; then MSI disabled and INTx deliberately misrouted, where xHCI got
zero interrupts and the root still mounted through the poller. i440fx
INTx and the rtl8139 hand-over are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
Every one of these works under QEMU and stops a real machine:
- MADT processors that are "online capable" but not enabled were
counted as CPUs. AMD firmware lists absent cores that way (so does
QEMU with maxcpus), and startothers() then waited for ever for an
AP that does not exist. Only enabled entries count now, x2APIC
(type 9) entries are read too, and the wait is bounded to a second;
an AP that misses it is parked with INIT and the boot goes on.
- The PIT calibration loop had no bound. Recent boards clock-gate the
8254: the output never rises (a hang) or floats high (TSC "0 MHz"
and every clock thousands of times fast). The loop is bounded and
checked, and falls back to the ACPI PM timer, then CPUID 0x15/0x16.
Under QEMU pit=off the PM timer gives the same figures the PIT did.
- Firmware that hands over in x2APIC mode left lapic[] reading
garbage: cpunum() panicked or the timer never started. Each CPU is
switched back to xAPIC first (x2APIC -> disabled -> xAPIC).
- The IOAPIC was always at 0xFEC00000 and interrupts were aimed at
APIC ID "0". Both now come from the firmware's tables.
- INIT-to-STARTUP was 100 us ("Bochs is slow"); it is the 10 ms the
MP specification asks for.
- mouseinit() drained the 8042 with an unbounded loop. With no
controller the port reads 0xFF and the loop never ends. It now
notices there is no controller and skips the mouse.
Tested in QEMU: i440fx and q35, -smp 4, -smp 2,maxcpus=4, pit=off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
The kernel's rtl8139 driver had no release hook, so /dev/pci refused
every request for the card ("the kernel would not release it") and a
hosted 8139too could never run on a machine where this driver probed
first.
release() follows e1000_release(): silence the chip before unhooking the
interrupt, reset it and clear bus mastering so it stops writing into its
buffers, take the interface out of the stack, then give the DMA buffers
back.
Tested in QEMU: ldlsd takes the card from the kernel, 8139too probes it,
DHCP binds ldls0, and ping 10.9.0.2 gets 3 of 3 replies.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
Nexoniarz is the sole author and SchOS was never published under
Apache-2.0, so this is a straight relicence. LICENSE is the FSF GPLv2 text,
every first-party SPDX header moves to GPL-2.0-or-later, and NOTICE,
README.md, docs/licensing.md and the site say so. projects/schfs-linux
follows the rest of the tree.
The GPL gives copyleft: a fork has to ship its source. It also lifts the
old "Linux drivers, never" rule, since GPL-2.0-only code combines with
GPL-2.0-or-later. "Or later" leaves room for GPLv3, but one binary still
has to pick one version, so docs/licensing.md now keeps Apache-2.0 and
GPLv3 code out of the kernel to keep Linux code possible there. BSD
4-clause code goes from "avoid" to "no", because the advertising clause
is GPL-incompatible.
LDLS still ships no .ko. That boundary is now project policy rather than
a legal requirement, and ldls.md, devices.md and licensing.md section 6
say so. refmod declares license=GPL, and ldls-check passes (27 checks).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things, and the first one is the freeze.
**The loader jumped out from under itself.** A machine with a lot of RAM
stopped at "Starting the kernel" with the splash still up: no panic, no reset,
nothing. The firmware's own exception handler had the answer the whole time,
once a machine was found that printed it:
X64 Exception Type - 0E(#PF - Page-Fault)
ExceptionData - 0x10 I:1 P:0
RIP - 0000000140004DEE <- the loader's own code, at 5.4 GB
RAX - 0000000000001000 <- the page tables it had just installed
RCX - 00000000001000F0 <- the kernel it was about to jump to
I:1 P:0 is an instruction fetch from a page that is not present. The loader
built page tables covering four gigabytes, loaded cr3 -- and the firmware had
placed the loader image *above* four gigabytes, so the next instruction fetch
was unmapped. It reproduces exactly on `-m 8G` and never on `-m 1G`, which is
why every test here passed.
The PDPT is one page whether four entries are filled or all 512, so all 512
are: 512 GB of identity map, replaced by kvmalloc() a few hundred instructions
later.
**And 3 GB was never the limit, it was a circle.** PHYSTOP_MAX was 0xC0000000
because kvmalloc() mapped exactly four 1 GB pages, and kvmalloc mapped four
because that was the cap -- each holding the other up, throwing away thirteen
gigabytes of a sixteen gigabyte machine. kvmalloc now maps as many gigabytes as
the machine has RAM and tells ioremap where the direct map stopped, instead of
ioremap assuming it stopped at four.
Freeing memory becomes two passes, and the ordering is forced rather than
chosen: kinit1() runs *before* kvmalloc because kvmalloc calls kalloc for its
own page tables, and freeing a page means writing into it -- so kinit1 can only
touch what the loader mapped. kinit_high() adds the rest afterwards.
`phystop` and the new `lowtop` are now two different numbers: the DMA arena
stays below 4 GB because a device is not obliged to reach the top of memory,
and an RTL8139's buffer address register is thirty-two bits wide.
**And the 0 MB.** The System Information screen reported "0 MB usable" on a
machine with sixteen gigabytes in it, because memory_mb() had its own 16 KB
guess at how big a memory map gets, and returned zero when GetMemoryMap said
EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL. That is the same bug as the previous commit's, in a
second copy, and this one failed silently. There is one buffer and one
map_read() now.
Verified at 1 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB: all three boot, no traps, no panics, socktest
and memfdtest green in each. 8 GB and 16 GB did not boot at all before -- and
16 GB now reports 17408 MB with "mem: 13312 MB above 4 GB added to the
allocator", where the old kernel would have used three. Both display
configurations still clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
EFI status 0x5 is EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL, and that is the whole bug: the loader
asked the firmware for its memory map with a 32 KB buffer, which is about 680
descriptors -- generous next to QEMU's map and not generous at all next to a
machine whose firmware has carved out every reserved range it has ever needed.
The descriptor count is a property of the vendor, not of the RAM, which is why
this was invisible in every test here and fatal on two real machines.
The fix is not a bigger guess. A call with a **zero size** fails on purpose and
fills in the size actually needed, and it allocates nothing -- so the map key
from the real call immediately after is still valid, which is the constraint
this whole sequence is written around and the reason the buffer has to be
static. 256 KB now, which is 5461 descriptors, and a machine that somehow
exceeds even that is told in numbers rather than in a status code:
schos: the firmware's memory map needs 5664 bytes and this loader has 512
schos: memory map larger than the loader's buffer (status 0x...0005)
That line is real: the failure path was provoked by shrinking the buffer to 512
and booting, which is also how the 5664 was measured -- QEMU needs 118
descriptors, so hardware needs more.
**A second limit is nearby, and it is only a warning.** SCHBOOT_E820_MAX is 40
entries, fixed by the hand-off block's layout; build_e820() merges adjacent
regions of the same type, so 40 survives a long map. If it ever does truncate,
what is dropped is the high end -- the map arrives sorted and phystop is capped
below 4 GB regardless -- so it stays a warning. But it now appears on screen as
well as on the serial line, because after the splash print() goes to a port a
laptop does not have, and "some RAM was quietly unused" is not a thing to
discover months later from a total that never looked right.
Both supported configurations: one boot each, no traps, no panics, socktest and
memfdtest green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A laptop has no serial port, and the machine we are trying to boot stops with
the loader's splash still on screen. Three completely different things look
exactly like that: the jump never landed, the kernel started and hung, or the
kernel started and panicked with a full report drawn into a framebuffer nobody
can see. They call for different next steps, so the kernel now says which
without needing a console at all.
**A bar, as the kernel's first act.** Eight lines of accent colour across the
top of the framebuffer, written straight through the handoff block before a
single subsystem exists -- no gfx, no scanout, no allocator, nothing that can
itself fail. If it appears over the splash, the jump landed and the kernel is
executing. If it does not, nothing below that point is worth looking at.
Skipped when the framebuffer is above the direct map, because a fault there
leaves the machine quieter still, and free on a boot that works: the console
clears the screen a few lines later.
**Blinking keyboard lights, on panic.** Scroll, Num and Caps together, about
three times a second, for ever. It is the one output every PC has had since
before any of this existed -- no driver, no interrupt, no memory -- and it
works when the graphics do not. Linux does the same thing for the same reason.
Every wait in it is bounded. It runs after `panicked` is set so there is
nothing left to protect, but a machine that hangs inside its own death rattle
tells you less than one that stops quietly. The delay is microdelay, which
spins on the TSC: no timer, no interrupt, no calibration -- all three of which
a kernel that died during boot may not have.
That makes the three cases distinguishable from across the room: no bar and no
blink is a jump that did not land; a bar and no blink is a kernel that hung; a
blinking keyboard is a panic, and the report is in /proc/kmsg after a restart.
**And the loader now describes the mode it is actually handing over**, not only
the one the firmware started in. On a machine where changing the resolution
loses the splash entirely, the difference between those two lines is the bug
report; on a boot that works nobody sees either, because ClearScreen runs a few
lines later.
Verified: `echo c > /proc/sysrq`, then QMP polled for five and a half seconds
afterwards -- the machine answers throughout and a screendump still shows the
panic report intact, so the blink loop runs without faulting, resetting, or
scribbling on what it is there to accompany. Both supported configurations
boot clean with the early bar in place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
