Commit graph SchOS/docs/architecture/terminals.md
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nexoniarz
2556a955b3 docs: architecture describes what is built now
kernel (threads, demand paging, TLB shootdowns, dynamic linking, RAM direct map), syscalls, filesystem (/proc, /sys,
/dev), terminals (12, VT handshake, ptys), networking (r8169 through LDLS), LDLS (module sets; Linux code may ship),
devices (what stays in the kernel; hybrid.md's lasting content), boot (the loader's placement of the kernel),
graphics (fbdev, GMMOS, QR 1-40), audio (ALSA over OSS), debugging, usb. New: packages.md (the apk root) and
desktop.md (Xorg on the framebuffer).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EVRhxi9zpdW2uDUN4FVcao
2026-10-26 07:57:25 +01:00
Nexoniarz
54b25708c3 Demand paging, the RTL8168H, links that come up late, and Ctrl+Alt+F1..F12
- Anonymous memory can be reserved without being backed: large mappings,
  MAP_NORESERVE and PROT_NONE are recorded and each page appears, zeroed,
  on first touch -- from trap() for the program, from uva2ka() for the
  kernel on its behalf. WebKit reserves 4 GB at start and touches a sliver;
  backing it all failed with ENOMEM and Epiphany aborted.
- r8169: the 8168G generation and later (the laptop's 8168H, XID 541) are
  taken from the firmware's out-of-band mode, get their PLL powered, the
  receive gate opened, and their PHY reached through the OCP window. The
  PHY's power-down bit is cleared; the old code kept it while restarting
  autonegotiation. Untested on the hardware so far.
- The network thread follows each device's link into lwIP. The link was
  read once at attach, 0.02 s into boot; real autonegotiation takes
  seconds, so on hardware the interface stayed down for good.
- Twelve terminals, switched with Ctrl+Alt+F1..F12 by default: the keys X
  uses, so the console and the desktop agree. AltGr+F-key is gone from
  the defaults (chvt -c altgr+F brings it back).
- SO_PASSCRED on Unix sockets, with SCM_CREDENTIALS delivered by recvmsg.
  WebKit sets it on its IPC sockets and aborted when refused.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
2026-10-25 11:27:48 +01:00
Nexoniarz
a1c965da1e include: one folder per subsystem, and includes that name it
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
2026-10-23 15:05:12 +02:00
Nexoniarz
26bca020b6 licence: SchOS is GPL-2.0-or-later, no longer Apache-2.0
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>
2026-10-22 08:48:45 +02:00
Nexoniarz
4e3e345b41 kbd: three layouts, and the arrow keys were sitting on top of UTF-8
`∞`, `→`, `≤` and `'` could not be typed. `ą` and `ę` could. That pairing is
the whole diagnosis: KBD_UP was 0xE2 and its neighbours filled 0xE0..0xE9,
which are exactly the UTF-8 lead bytes for three-byte characters. Every
character in U+0800..U+FFFF -- most punctuation, every arrow, every maths
symbol, the whole of CJK -- arrived as a value the console read as an arrow key
and helpfully turned into `ESC [ A`. Two-byte sequences lead with 0xC4 and
nothing claimed 0xC4, so Polish came through and the rest did not.

The chord codes already knew this rule and said so in a comment. The navigation
keys predate them and were never brought in line. Stated once, in kbd.h: a key
produces either a Unicode codepoint or a value above 0x10FFFF, and nothing in
between means anything. KEY_* -> KBD_*, which also settles a silent collision
-- include/input.h defines its own KEY_HOME, KEY_UP and KEY_END as evdev
numbers, and kbd.c includes both headers, so three macros were being quietly
redefined in the one file that used them.

Then the layouts, which is what the codepoint-sized keycodes were for.

kernel/dev/keymap.c: us, pl, de. A layout is four tables -- plain, Shift,
AltGr, Shift+AltGr -- of uint32 codepoints. uint32 and not uchar is the reason
the file exists: `ó` fits in a byte and `ą` does not, and half a Polish
alphabet is not a Polish layout.

Two things deliberately are *not* tables:

  - **Ctrl is derived from the plain codepoint.** The table it replaces was
    indexed by scancode, which quietly assumed US -- on QWERTZ the Y and Z keys
    swap, so Ctrl+Z would have suspended a job only on some layouts.
  - **Caps Lock is a case toggle on the result**, so AltGr+a with Caps Lock is
    `Ą`. No second table could say that, because Caps Lock combines with AltGr
    rather than replacing it. Latin Extended-A alternates upper/lower by
    codepoint but not all the same way round -- Ł is U+0141 (odd) and Ą is
    U+0104 (even) -- so Polish lands in both halves and the parity matters.

kbdgetc() encodes to UTF-8 and returns the bytes one call at a time.
consoleintr()'s contract is bytes: the serial line hands it UTF-8 already and
it could not tell an encoded codepoint from a byte of the same value.

The layouts live in the kernel. Linux's loadkeys compiles a text keymap and
uploads it a key at a time through KDSKBENT, which puts the data in userspace
-- and a machine whose /usr has not mounted then has no layout at all. Here the
kernel always has a working keyboard and `loadkeys` only names which one.
KB_GETLAYOUT/KB_SETLAYOUT/KB_LISTLAYOUT; /etc/vconsole.conf and an
os.schos.keymap job for the boot-time choice. No dead keys, so French and
Spanish are absent rather than wrong.

/etc/locale.conf and LANG=C.UTF-8 in profile and zshenv. Only the charset half
of that is real -- musl decodes UTF-8 whatever the locale says and ships no
locale data -- but an unset LANG reads as "ASCII only" to everything that asks,
which is its own way of producing `?`.

And two symlink bugs found while chasing

    zsh: locking failed for /root/.zsh_history: operation not permitted

on every boot. symlink() is the classic atomic lock -- create the link, and if
it exists someone else holds it -- and zsh distinguishes EEXIST ("contended,
retry") from anything else ("this cannot work, give up"). sys_symlink returned
a bare -1, which is -EPERM, so every zsh on the machine took the second branch
on a filesystem that supports symlinks perfectly well. Same errno class as
commit 75ccf98.

The second one the first was hiding: **divesymlink() has been in fs.c since the
fork and nothing ever called it.** A symlink behaved as a small file containing
its own target, so `cat link` printed the target's *name*. open() and openat()
follow the final component now (O_NOFOLLOW gives ELOOP), and stat() and lstat()
stop being the same function, since which one follows is the only difference
between them. Mid-path symlinks are still not resolved -- that belongs in
namex(), which would re-enter lookup holding a directory lock.

Verified on the emulated keyboard, not just over serial: AltGr+a/e/s gives
ąęś, Shift+AltGr gives ĄĘŚ, Caps Lock+AltGr gives ĄĘŚ, de types zy for the
physical y/z keys and @€µ on AltGr. `∞ 'x' → ≤ • — …` typed over serial now
survives. Three fresh boots: 0 lock failures, 0 faults.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-20 01:09:32 +02:00
Nexoniarz
5618164754 font: the console draws outlines now, and a byte could not have held Ą
"Ą Ę Ś Ł Ż" drew as "?????" and the obvious diagnosis -- the font has no
glyphs for them -- was wrong twice over. `struct vtcell.ch` was **one byte**
holding a CP437 index, and the console mapped UTF-8 down to it on the way in.
U+0104 does not fit in a byte. No font could have fixed that; the cell had to
get wider first.

So: `ch` is a uint32 codepoint, the mapping on the way in is gone, and the cell
draws through kernel/dev/ttf.c against JetBrains Mono linked into the image.
Cell size comes from the font's measured advance instead of a hardcoded 8x16.
The grid costs 864 KB of BSS instead of 432 KB, which is the honest price of
holding a codepoint per cell for six terminals at 240x75.

The rasteriser needed three fixes before it could be trusted with this.

**21 KB of locals on a 4 KB kernel stack.** `ttf_render` held an outline (512
points as three arrays) and a raster (1024 edges) as automatics. KSTACKSIZE is
4096. They walked off the bottom of the stack into whatever was underneath,
which surfaced as user processes faulting on addresses they never touched and
then a panic inside freevm() on an overwritten page directory. Nothing pointed
anywhere near a font.

**And then again, recursively.** load_outline() held a 4736-byte outline as a
local *and recursed* for composite glyphs. Composite glyphs are exactly Ą, Ę,
Ś, Ł, Ż -- so the second crash arrived the moment the first fix let Unicode
reach the screen, looking like a fresh bug. Now a static outline per recursion
level with a depth cap of 4 (the font's deepest real nesting is 2), and the
leaf parse split into load_simple() so its 512-byte flag array is not
multiplied by the depth. Worst chain measured from the object file: ~2.3 KB.

Neither showed in tools/ttftest, which has an 8 MB stack. That is the standing
hazard of one source file built for host and kernel: the host is most forgiving
about exactly the resource the kernel is strictest about.

**Component transforms were being skipped**, on the stated theory that a wrong
transform is worse than none. It is not. `‘` in this font is the comma glyph
with a scale of -1 -- a 180-degree rotation -- and the offset that ships with
it only lands correctly after the rotation. Without it the mark went twelve
pixels into a ten-pixel cell and was clipped away entirely, so the character
read as missing from the font rather than as misplaced. F2Dot14 2x2 now, with
SCALED_COMPONENT_OFFSET honoured.

The glyph cache was ASCII-only, so every accented letter re-rasterised on every
repaint: a screenful of Polish did hundreds of bezier flattenings per scroll
where the same screenful of English did none. 95 reserved ASCII slots plus 224
shared slots keyed by codepoint, 64 KB pool. Verified 13680 cached renders
byte-identical to direct ones across collisions and a pool flush.

tools/ttftest speaks UTF-8 now. Iterating bytes meant it could only ever ask
for ASCII, and ASCII is entirely simple glyphs -- it could not reach the code
path that mattered.

Also: resolvconf's success line moves behind /proc/bootmode, same rule as
vgpud. A quiet boot opened with "resolvconf: nameserver 10.0.2.3" where the
one line was supposed to be "Welcome to SchOS!". Failures stay loud.

Verified on screen, not just on the host: Ą Ę Ś Ł Ż ć ń ó ź, Ω λ π Œ Ð Æ ß,
∞ ‘x’ → ≤ all render, panic=0 across four boots.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-20 00:35:34 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ff7afa746e tty: arrow keys, backspace, and four terminals nobody was home on
Three things, all in the first minute of using a shell.

**Arrow keys corrupted the two keystrokes after them.** They arrive as single
keycodes -- KEY_UP is 0xE2 -- and were pushed into the input buffer exactly
like that. No terminal works that way, and 0xE2 is the worst possible byte to
have chosen: it is a UTF-8 lead byte for a three-byte character, so a reader
decoding UTF-8 swallowed the next two keys waiting for continuations that never
arrived. consoleintr() sends the DEC/xterm sequences now -- ESC[A, ESC[D,
ESC[5~ and the rest -- which every terminfo entry and every line editor already
knows. Not echoed: in canonical mode echoing them would move the cursor for
real, which was the other half of what "weird glitches" looked like.

**Then the end of the line vanished as you typed into it**, with the buffer
perfectly correct. One line in vt_putc(): backspace erased the cell it moved
onto. That is a line-discipline erase, not the BS control character -- a
program rubbing a character out sends `\b \b`, and the separation matters
because programs also use plain `\b` to go back. zsh does, on every mid-line
edit:

    echo alpha  \b\b  zha  \b\b

back two, rewrite the tail, back two again to park the cursor. Against a
destructive backspace that last pair deleted the `ha` it had just drawn.

`\b` moves and nothing else now, 0x7f is ignored as on a real terminal, and
consputc() spells its own erase out as `\b \b` as it already did for serial.
ESC[@, ESC[P and ESC[X went in alongside, because TERM=linux declares them.

**VT3 to VT6 were blank** because nothing ran on them. NVT is 6 and the kernel
made all six; only two had a shell, so Alt+F3 switched to a terminal that was
working perfectly and had nobody to talk to. Four more manifests.

Six shells starting at once is enough concurrency to expose an intermittent
fault in one of them -- one boot in five, a wild jump into .data that runs
until it writes to 0, which nothing catches because SchOS never sets EFER.NXE.
Three boots with two shells, none. Recorded rather than fixed: it is not caused
by the manifests, only made likelier by them.

Also: QEMU_NET forwards host 8080/8081/8000 to guest 80/8080/8000, so the httpd
is reachable from the machine running QEMU instead of being sealed behind NAT.
Verified end to end. And the greeting prints once again -- a replaced
supervisor was announcing a boot that had already happened.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 22:43:54 +02:00
Nexoniarz
75ccf9841c errno: -1 is EPERM, and four places were saying it by accident
Ctrl-C killed the shell. consoleread() breaks off the read in progress when
SIGINT arrives and returned -1 to do it -- and -1 is -EPERM by the time it
reaches a program, so every program that handles SIGINT by carrying on saw a
permanent error instead of an interrupted call:

    zsh: error on TTY read: operation not permitted
    schinitd: restarting os.schos.console-shell

and the next Ctrl-C did it to the replacement. EINTR now, which is what a
signal-interrupted read is required to give. Verified: Ctrl-C an interruptible
command, shell survives, zero restarts.

Same mistake, same file family: link, unlink, rename and renameat returned -1
on every error path. Callers branch on errno -- `if (unlink(p) < 0 && errno !=
ENOENT)` is the standard shape, and against EPERM it always complains -- which
is why zsh reported failures for things that had worked. They return ENOENT,
EEXIST, EXDEV, EISDIR, ENOTEMPTY and EFAULT now. About ninety other `return -1`s
remain in sys_fs.c; these four are done because these four were what a program
tripped over. /dev/mem's unknown minors return ENODEV rather than -1 too.

/dev/urandom was a linear congruential generator seeded with a **constant**, so
every boot produced the same bytes in the same order -- not weak, the same. A
key, a nonce, a temporary filename: shared with every SchOS machine that had
ever run. Seeded at boot from RDRAND where the CPU has it, from the cycle
counter and the wall clock where it does not, and re-stirred per byte. Still an
LCG and still not a CSPRNG; what changed is the part that was dangerous rather
than merely poor.

**Not fixed, and recorded as such:** rename() still will not replace an existing
target, so zsh's history save fails on every exit after the first. An attempt to
unlink the target first was reverted -- the directory is an HTree, dirunlink
followed by dirlink of the same name did not behave, and it panicked in
filewrite with the old file already gone. Losing both files is worse than
refusing, so it refuses until the HTree's slot reuse is understood.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 22:12:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
65906639da tty: AltGr+F1..F6 by default, and AltGr+-/+ to step
The sweet spot was available the whole time and I ruled it out by writing
"AltGr+anything" when the true statement is "AltGr+*letter*".

A Polish layout wants AltGr with a letter -- ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż. AltGr with a
function key produces nothing on any layout, no window manager binds it, and
no application asks for it. It is the one combination the host, applications
and the keyboard layout all leave alone, and the previous three commits talked
themselves out of it on a technicality that was mine, not the hardware's.

Verified rather than argued, with QEMU sendkey and screendump hashes:

    AltGr+F2   -> tty2
    AltGr+F1   -> back, pixel-identical to the start
    AltGr+a    -> reaches zsh, so ą still types

That distinction is only expressible because Right Alt became its own modifier
bit two commits ago. Sharing ALT is harmless for typing -- neither is used to
look up a character -- and made this impossible to say.

Also added, since it was asked for in the same breath: minus and equals step
to the previous and next terminal, on whatever the chord's modifiers are. They
skip terminals that are not in use -- the same `opened` count VT_GETSTATE
reports -- because six terminals with two shells on them means four blank
screens in between, and cycling past those is worse than not having the key.

    AltGr+=  -> tty2, again -> wraps to tty1   (only two in use)
    AltGr+-  -> tty2

chvt -c still moves all of it, and `chvt` reports both halves.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 13:22:01 +02:00
Nexoniarz
7c0f7c7d01 tty: the switch chord is a setting, because only the host knows the answer
Third guess at a chord, and the third one would have been wrong too: a display
manager that grabs Ctrl+Alt+F<n> matches loosely, so Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F2 never
reaches the guest either. Extra modifiers do not get past a loose grab.

The real problem is that this is not knowable from inside. A key the host
swallowed is indistinguishable from a key nobody pressed, so the guest cannot
probe for a free combination, and there is no combination that is free
everywhere:

  the HOST takes    Alt+F4, Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6 (loosely matched),
                    Ctrl+Alt+digit (QEMU's own console tabs)
  APPLICATIONS want Alt+anything (Meta -- zsh binds Meta-digit as
                    digit-argument), Ctrl+letter, Ctrl+Shift+digit
                    (Ctrl+Shift+2 types ^@), bare F-keys
  the LAYOUT wants  AltGr+letter

So it is a setting. VT_SETCHORD/VT_GETCHORD, and in userspace:

    chvt -c ctrl+shift+F       Ctrl+Shift+F1..F6   (the new default)
    chvt -c ctrl+alt+shift+F
    chvt -c alt+1
    chvt -c off                no chord; chvt N is then the only way
    chvt                       report the active terminal and the chord

`off` is a legitimate setting rather than a failure mode. On a machine whose
host grabs everything worth binding, `chvt N` is the honest answer.

The default moved to Ctrl+Shift+F1..F6: display managers bind Ctrl+Alt+F<n>,
not Ctrl+Shift+F<n>, and Ctrl+Shift with a *function* key is not a character
on any layout -- unlike Ctrl+Shift+digit, which is.

Caught while writing it: VTC_RALT was 0x08 while kbd.h's RALT is (1<<7), since
(1<<3) is CAPSLOCK. A chord set from userspace with AltGr would simply never
have matched, and the only symptom would have been a key that does nothing.
A _Static_assert now holds the two headers together.

Verified: Ctrl+Alt+F2 leaves the screen byte-identical, Ctrl+Shift+F2 switches,
Ctrl+Shift+F1 returns to a pixel-identical tty1, and chvt -c round-trips
through alt+1 and off and back. schfs-check passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 13:13:38 +02:00
Nexoniarz
fe2f5e1bf8 tty: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1..F6, and VT_SETMODE actually works
Alt+1..6 was a worse choice than the Alt+F-keys it replaced, and the reason
is the one that matters: anything the kernel swallows is taken from every
program that will ever run here, permanently.

Alt+<digit> is Meta-digit. zsh's own line editor binds it as digit-argument --
Alt+1 Alt+2 x repeats x twelve times -- and every readline editor does the
same. Yesterday's chord broke that system-wide, which is exactly the failure
mode of picking a chord applications want.

Working the whole space instead of one axis of it:

  the HOST takes    Alt+F4, Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6
  APPLICATIONS want Alt+anything (Meta), Ctrl+letter, Ctrl+Shift+digit
                    (Ctrl+Shift+2 types ^@), bare F-keys
  the LAYOUT wants  AltGr+letter -- Polish diacritics

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1..F6 is in none of those sets. Display managers bind the same
chord without Shift, so adding it steps out of the host's way, and no terminal
application binds a triple-modified function key.

Which chords actually reach a guest was measured rather than assumed: a
temporary probe in kbdgetc logged every modified keypress and QEMU's sendkey
fired each candidate at it. Everything reached the guest, Ctrl+Alt+F2
included -- so that conflict is the host's display manager, not QEMU. The same
probe corrected an earlier claim: `sendkey altgr-2` produces no event at all,
so the previous commit's "AltGr+2 did not fire" was never actually tested.

And the escape hatch is real now. VT_SETMODE was accepted and ignored, so a
program could ask to own the chord, be told yes, and still not get it.
VT_PROCESS genuinely stops the kernel switching. Together with the EVIOCGRAB
path -- which kbdgetc already checks before the chord is recognised -- there
are three honest layers: nothing, VT_PROCESS, exclusive grab.

What VT_PROCESS still does not do is the VT_RELDISP handshake; struct vt_mode
carries relsig/acqsig for when Schcom needs to release the GPU before the
screen changes hands.

Verified by screendump hash: Alt+2 reaches zsh as Meta, Ctrl+Alt+F2 and
Ctrl+Shift+F2 leave the screen untouched, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F2 switches.
schfs-check passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 13:05:43 +02:00
Nexoniarz
91a6d440d6 tty: Alt+1..6 switches terminals, and AltGr is left alone
Alt+F1..F6 was wrong in three separate ways, and the third is the one that
matters most here.

  Alt+F4            the host window manager closes the QEMU window
  Alt+F2            GNOME and KDE open a run dialog
  Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6   the host switches its *own* virtual terminals
  AltGr+anything    Polish diacritics -- a c e l n o s x z with their marks --
                    and on some setups AltGr is delivered as Ctrl+Alt
  Ctrl+Shift+key    widely bound inside applications
  Scroll Lock       not present on many keyboards

Alt+1..6 survives all of it: the number row, so no function key is involved,
and left Alt, so AltGr is untouched.

Right Alt is tracked as its own modifier bit now. It used to share ALT, which
is harmless for typing -- neither is used to look up a character -- and wrong
for chords, because it made AltGr indistinguishable from Alt.

And the test is an equality rather than a mask:

    if ((shift & (CTL | SHIFT | ALT | RALT)) == ALT && ...)

`shift & ALT` fired on Ctrl+Alt+1 and AltGr+1 as well, so a chord aimed at the
host -- or an ordinary Polish keystroke -- would have switched terminals
behind your back. That was a real bug in what shipped yesterday.

Verified with QEMU's sendkey, comparing screendump hashes:

    start (tty1)   86cee2284878
    Ctrl+Alt+2     86cee2284878   identical -- did not fire
    AltGr+2        86cee2284878   identical -- did not fire
    Alt+2          114562804a78   switched
    Alt+1          86cee2284878   back, pixel-identical to the start

schfs-check passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 12:56:34 +02:00
Nexoniarz
a5b0d5a0ef tty: the grid was 80x24 on a 160x50 screen, and wrapping was eager
Three symptoms, two causes, both in the terminal layer.

**The grid and TIOCGWINSZ disagreed about the size.** vt_init() sizes every
grid from gfx_cols()/gfx_rows(), and it runs at main.c:75 -- while the display
driver attaches its scanout from the PCI bus walk at main.c:99. So the grids
were the 80x24 fallback, and TIOCGWINSZ, which computed its own answer live,
said 160x50.

That one disagreement produced all three things visible in the report: text
stopped two thirds of the way down the screen, `ls` laid out 160 columns into
an 80-column grid so words split across the wrap ("vers" / "ion"), and zsh's
cursor tracking was wrong on every line.

Fixed in two places, because either alone would leave the trap set:
gfx_attach_scanout() now calls vt_resize(), so the grids learn the real screen
the moment there is one; and TIOCGWINSZ reports v->cols/v->rows rather than
measuring again. One number, from the terminal being asked.

**Wrapping was eager.** A glyph printed in the last column moved the cursor to
the next line immediately. Real terminals set a pending-wrap flag and wrap when
the *next* glyph arrives -- which is why a line exactly as wide as the screen
takes one row and not two, and why a program can write the bottom-right cell
without scrolling.

zsh's partial-line marker depends on that rule directly: it writes exactly
COLUMNS-1 spaces and expects to still be on the line. With eager wrap it left a
reverse-video '#' above every prompt, which is the hashtag in the report. Both
are gone.

Verified by screendump: `ls /proc` now fits one line with "version" intact, no
markers, and output fills the screen to the last row. schfs-check passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 12:49:13 +02:00
Nexoniarz
1c1b0c9570 tty: six virtual terminals, and the plumbing that makes them terminals
/dev/tty1..tty6, Alt+F1..F6 or `chvt N`. Each is an independent terminal --
its own screen, cursor, line discipline, foreground process group and
session. Two shells on two terminals are unrelated processes that share a
keyboard and a screen.

What made it possible is a backing store. The console drew straight into the
framebuffer and scrolled by moving pixels, which works exactly as long as
nothing else wants the screen: there was nowhere to put terminal 2 while
terminal 1 was visible, and nothing to repaint terminal 1 from. Each terminal
owns a grid of cells now and the framebuffer shows whichever grid is active,
so vt_switch() is set-index, repaint, return -- nothing is saved on the way
out because the outgoing grid has been current all along.

The rule the layer is built on: a terminal does not know whether it is
visible. Writes land in the grid, the cursor moves, the grid scrolls, all
unconditionally; drawing is one question asked at the bottom of vt.c. Every
alternative spreads "am I on screen" through the escape parser, and then a
terminal switched away from mid-sequence comes back wrong.

Everything that was a single global is per-terminal now: tty_fg_pgrp (deleted),
termios, the input ring, the escape parser, the UTF-8 decoder, and the cursor
-- which also stops being pixels in gfx.c and becomes cells in the terminal.
TIOCSCTTY was `return 0` and now records proc->ctty, which is what /dev/tty
resolves through; /dev/tty was an alias for /dev/console with the same minor,
and they are different questions.

kbd.c names Alt+F1..F6 as KEY_ALT_F1+n, above 0xFF on purpose -- every byte
value is already a character or a UTF-8 continuation, and a chord colliding
with one would be typed into the terminal instead of switching away from it.
What the chord means is decided in console.c, where the terminals are.

VT_ACTIVATE / VT_WAITACTIVE / VT_GETSTATE / VT_OPENQRY, Linux's numbers.
The argument to ACTIVATE is by value, not a pointer -- same shape as TCFLSH.

Two bugs found by screenshotting the result rather than reading the log:

  - zsh emits 0x0F to leave alt-charset mode, because that is what the `linux`
    terminfo says rmacs is, and the console drew CP437 glyph 0x0F: a sun, in
    the prompt, on every line. A terminal never draws a C0 control character.
  - SGR 7 was unimplemented, so zsh's partial-line marker rendered as a bare
    '#' instead of a reversed block. Reverse video swaps the colours at draw
    time, not at store time, so turning it off restores what was underneath.

Verified by screendump: tty1 and tty2 show different screens, and switching
back repaints tty1's earlier content from its grid. schfs-check passes.

docs/architecture/terminals.md, including what it does not do -- no
scrollback, no reflow, no VT_PROCESS mode for a display server to veto a
switch, which Schcom will need before it owns Alt+F7.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 00:08:00 +02:00