Groundwork for the unified loader: before the two paths can share code,
they have to agree on what they are producing, and until now they only
agreed by coincidence.
Every field of the loader/kernel hand-off was #defined in whichever file
happened to need it -- kernel/core/main.c, kernel/dev/vga.c,
kernel/arch/x86_64/e820.c, boot/bios/cdboot.S, boot/bios/stage2main.c and
boot/uefi/main.c, six copies of the same addresses. schboot.h existed for
exactly this and held only the entry magic and the RSDP slot, with a
comment describing the rest of the block it did not define.
The whole block lives there now: the VBE info fields, the verbose and
media flags (with the real-mode segment:offset spelling cdboot.S needs),
the e820 count, map and cap, and the RSDP. Every one of those files
includes it instead of restating it.
This is not a tidy-up. It is the same hazard as defining the entry magic
twice, only quieter -- nothing breaks until one copy moves, and the two
loaders diverging is precisely what produced the EFER.SCE and RSDP bugs,
where a fix on one path silently did not exist on the other.
Verified on both firmwares: BIOS boots to schinit with the same e820,
ACPI and VGA lines as before; UEFI reaches cpu0 with 1018 MB in 7 regions
and its own 1280x800 mode. `make iso` still builds. bootcheck 108 [ok].
Next: the loaders become starters that gather firmware-specific facts and
hand to one common stage. That needs the BIOS side to climb to long mode
first, since common code can only be compiled for one CPU mode -- which
is the risky part, and is why the contract went first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
find_rsdp() scanned the EBDA and 0xE0000-0x100000. That is a BIOS
convention, and UEFI firmware is under no obligation to leave a copy
there -- OVMF does not. So the kernel found no RSDP, no MADT and no
IOAPIC, and nothing routed IRQ 4. Serial output is polled, so the machine
booted all the way to a shell prompt and then ignored every key, which
reads as a broken console rather than a missing table.
The UEFI loader reads the RSDP out of the EFI configuration table,
preferring ACPI 2.0 for its XSDT, and leaves it at SCHBOOT_RSDP_ADDR --
the same low-memory hand-off block the e820 map already uses, now
described in include/schboot.h so the two sides cannot disagree.
The kernel validates it rather than trusting it: the BIOS path never
writes that slot, so there it holds whatever was in memory, and following
a wild pointer faults before there is anything to report the fault with.
Signature and checksum do that. It deliberately does not require 16-byte
alignment -- that rule is about searching the BIOS area, and OVMF's RSDP
sits at 0x3f77e014, so demanding it threw away the one address this code
exists to use.
UEFI now reports "acpi: 1 cpu, lapic at ..., ioapic id 0" and the ISO
boots to an interactive shell: uname, ls /bin (241), writing and reading
a file, ps, /proc/schfs -- all driven over serial.
BIOS unchanged: bootcheck 108 [ok], same ACPI line as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Loads the kernel from the ESP, places its ELF segments, records the
framebuffer, translates the UEFI memory map into E820 entries, exits boot
services, builds the page tables the kernel expects and jumps. Verified
under OVMF: the kernel starts, brings up PCI, VGA, e1000 and the RTC, and
reaches "cpu0: starting".
UEFI structures are written from the specification rather than importing
gnu-efi or EDK II -- a large dependency for two hundred lines of use, and
a licensing question the project does not need to answer. clang emits
PE/COFF directly, so this needs no new toolchain.
The kernel gained a second entry point. The multiboot entry is 32-bit
code that climbs into long mode itself, and firmware that already put us
there would have to drop back down only to climb out again -- a mode
switch whose failure mode is a triple fault with no console. So entry.S
publishes its 64-bit entry the same way it publishes the multiboot
header: a magic to scan for, SCH64BOO, with include/schboot.h owning the
constants so the two cannot disagree. That header goes *after* the
multiboot header, never before: header_addr says the multiboot header
lives at mboot_load_addr, and the BIOS loader computes the kernel's file
offset from it.
The kernel loads its own GDT at that entry rather than the loader doing
it. Arriving in long mode means arriving on the firmware's descriptors,
and the first thing depending on the kernel's own selectors faulted --
"unexpected trap 13 ... cs=38", a long way from the cause.
KNOWN LIMITATION, diagnosed and not yet fixed: e820_init takes the usable
run *containing the kernel*, which under OVMF ends at 8 MB -- the
firmware places an ACPI NVS region at 0x800000, so the run is genuinely
fragmented. The map is truthful and untruncated (21 entries); the
assumption of one contiguous run is BIOS-shaped. The fix is for the
kernel to free each usable region rather than one range, which touches
kalloc and deserves its own change rather than the tail of this one.
BIOS boot is unaffected: 27 checks, no failures.
