Porting zsh found four defects in the kernel and one in the filesystem. None
of them were about zsh; all of them had been there the whole time.
**exec threw the environment away.** kernel/fs/exec.c wrote a single zero for
envp with the comment "(no environment)" -- not yet, but ever, for every
process. musl has been passing a perfectly good envp to execve (Linux 59, which
SchOS answers) and it was never read. So $TERM was unset, $PATH was whatever
each program invented, and a variable exported in a shell did not survive the
exec meant to carry it. exec() takes an envp, sys_exec reads argument three,
and schinit manifests grew an Environment key. The userland two-argument
exec(path, argv) stays as a wrapper that passes null explicitly -- the raw stub
is execve now, so a short caller cannot leave %rdx holding a stray pointer.
**Which overflowed the kernel stack.** Three pointer arrays, ~1.8 KB, on a
4096-byte stack, under exec -> loaduvm -> readi -> SchFS -> btree. Pid 1 went
down on the first exec. The canary caught it and named the process, which is
what it is for. They live in one kalloc'd page now.
**waitpid returned a bare -1** for both "no children" and "interrupted". musl
reads [-4095,-1] as -errno, so userspace saw EPERM; zsh printed "wait failed:
operation not permitted" and abandoned the rest of /etc/zsh/zshrc. -ECHILD and
-EINTR now. Third time a bare -1 has cost real time -- on a system with no
permission model, EPERM should be read as "a syscall returned -1".
**NVMA was 64.** musl's allocator takes a mapping per size class and does not
release them eagerly, so compinit ran out of slots and got -1, which is EPERM,
which malloc turns into NULL, which zsh reports as "fatal error: out of memory"
-- on a machine with 1000 MB free. 256 slots, and -ENOMEM.
**And a small write to SchFS costs 58 ms.** 200 writes to one open file take
11.75 s; the same to /dev/null take 0.14 s. That is the design stated at the
top of kmount.c -- one transaction group per operation, and a commit is two
flushes and an uberblock -- not a bug. But compdump writes its digest with
thousands of separate prints, so it takes minutes and looks like a hang.
compinit -D, which skips the dump, finishes in 3.6 s. This one is a decision
rather than a fix, so it is written up and left: /etc/zsh/zshrc keeps compinit
switched off and explains exactly why, with the measurements.
zsh runs as /bin/zsh and is the console shell. ZLE works -- arrow keys recall
history through terminfo, $COLUMNS reads the real 160 because TIOCGWINSZ was
fixed, colour and prompt expansion work, startup is 0.14 s. mksh keeps /bin/sh,
so schinit's no-jobs fallback is a different program from the one that could
have failed.
Also fixed while here: AT_CLKTCK was the literal 100 and is USER_HZ; the
extract rule in four ports could move a source tree inside itself when make
re-ran it, which is how zsh's configure came to write modfile=zsh-5.9/... into
config.modules and fail three steps later.
schfs-check passes. Full writeup in docs/history/kernel.md section 14.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
The last three phases of the filesystem, which were written together and
touch the same files throughout -- kmount.c, objw.c and vfs.c are each
rewritten by all three -- so they land as one commit rather than three
that could not be built separately.
Durability. A transaction that reaches the platter out of order is worse
than one that never reached it: the uberblock can name a tree whose
blocks are still in the drive's write cache. bdirty/bflush give the
buffer layer an explicit barrier, ideflush issues ATA FLUSH CACHE and
usb_storage_flush the SCSI SYNCHRONIZE CACHE that means the same thing,
and a commit now waits for the data before it writes the root that
points at it. The uberblock groups are read newest-first with fallback,
so a volume whose newest roots are torn mounts at an older one and says
which generations were lost.
Reflink. Extents carry a refcount, so two objects can name the same
blocks and neither frees them while the other holds them. Exposed as
FICLONE -- Linux's ioctl value, so `cp --reflink` works unmodified --
and as cmd/reflink for the case where there is no cp to hand.
Attributes, and the one genuinely new idea here. attr.c stores named
values on an object, reachable through setxattr/getxattr/removexattr at
Linux's syscall numbers. On top of that, schfs_index declares an index
over an attribute name and schfs_query answers "which objects carry this
value" from the B-tree rather than by walking. A query against an
unindexed attribute is refused with an error, never silently answered by
a full scan: a query that quietly becomes a scan is worse than one that
admits it cannot help. cmd/schattr drives both.
Three bugs fixed on the way, each found by the numbers being wrong
rather than by inspection:
- statfs's f_fsid was declared int64[2]. Linux's fsid_t is two *ints*,
so every field after it landed one slot late: userland read f_frsize
out of f_namelen, got 255, and df reported a 32 MB root filesystem
as 1992 KB. It hid for as long as it did because the fields used to
be invented constants, so wrong numbers looked like the usual ones.
- struct inode's nlink was a short against SchFS's uint32, so a file
past 32767 names came back negative -- and iput frees an object
whose count reaches zero. It is an int now, signed on purpose, so an
underflow lands somewhere a check can see rather than wrapping.
- filewrite split every write to fit v1's log. That limit belongs to
the journal, not to writing, and SchFS makes one transaction of
whatever it is handed: a 1 MB write was becoming 170 commits and
170 flushes for nothing. fs_ops carries max_write now, and SchFS
sets no limit.
Also here: a real mount table, so `mount -t schfs /dev/hdb /mnt` shows
up in /proc/mounts -- df looks a path up there before it calls statfs at
all, so a mount missing from that list was invisible to it -- several
volumes mounted at once, snapshots mounted by name, and /proc/fsstat
with an rdtsc-based counter, which is the only instrument fine enough to
see inside a single syscall.
Verified: `make schfs-check` passes in full, including the sweep that
crashes the volume at each of 119 points mid-transaction and requires
every one to mount with exactly its committed data, and the case where
both newest uberblocks are rubbish and the volume still comes back. The
headless boot check passes with 27 [ok] and no failures, on a SchFS root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Removes the "-unix" element and with it any trademark exposure to The
Open Group.
The split follows the ecosystem layout: SchOS is the system, and the
kernel has its own name. Kernel-identity strings are the only places
that take SchIFT -- uname(2) sysname, /proc/version, and the two licence
sentences that say "kernel" outright. That is what every Unix does here:
`uname -s` on Linux reports the kernel, not the distribution. Everything
a user reads as the product -- panic screen, boot menu, error prefixes,
docs, LICENSE, NOTICE -- is SchOS.
schunix.img is schos.img, the logo assets and the musl TLS patch are
renamed, and __SCHUNIX__ is __SCHOS__ (the define and the patch that
consumes it moved together).
Two things the rename broke, both found by the bootcheck suite:
- shmtest wrote "SCHUNIX-MMAP-OK" with a hardcoded length of 15 and
compared it back by hand-counted offsets (m[3]=='U', m[14]=='K').
The shorter marker left the write running two bytes past the literal
and the compare reading past the data, failing a file-backed mmap
that was working correctly. Now written and compared through one
constant with sizeof.
- bootcheck asserted a 31-byte file after appending to
"hello-from-schunix"; the shorter string makes it 29.
Both are the same mistake: a string literal whose length is written out
somewhere else. Full suite green -- base, Tty, Ps, Sock, Fb, Usb, Evdev.
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.
Nexoniarz