Commit graph SchOS/kernel
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nexoniarz
415df0fd4d debugger: reachable from the console, and named on the crash screen
Two things, both about the debugger being available at the moment you
actually need it rather than once a shell exists.

**Ctrl-G on the console runs every view.** No filesystem, no /dev, no
shell -- it is the last thing main() sets up before entering the scheduler,
so it answers from early in boot, which is exactly when boot problems
happen. It sits beside the older Ctrl-P, and the difference between them is
the interesting part: procdump() takes no lock at all, deliberately,
because a lock is a way to hang while reporting a hang. The views cannot
follow that rule -- a free list read torn is worse than not read -- so they
take locks, and a lock must never be taken from an interrupt handler that
may have interrupted its holder. The key therefore *requests* and a kernel
thread *performs*. A scheduler too wedged to run a thread will not answer
Ctrl-G; Ctrl-P still will, and that division is the honest one.

**PSOGM says where the report went.** Its closing line used to be an
addr2line command, which the call chain no longer needs -- it prints names
now. What replaced it is the thing nobody would guess:

    This report is in /proc/kmsg after a restart.
    schdbg, or Ctrl-G on the console, asks more.
    PSOGM  --  Purple Screen of Guru Meditation

"Restart and read it" beats "photograph this screen" by a wide margin, and
until the log outlived the kernel it was not true. Both panic.c and
graphics.md had claimed in writing that the screen was the only artefact of
a crash; neither says so now. The QR code stays, because it is still the
only channel that works when the machine will not come back at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 01:29:30 +02:00
Nexoniarz
113595f80b debugger: who owns this page, and who just wrote to it
docs/plan/debugger.md D3 and D4, which finish the plan apart from the
network transport.

D3 -- `whose <addr>`. The views each speak for one subsystem, which is what
keeps them cheap and current, and it is exactly why none of them can see
the bug that matters: a page on the DMA arena's free list looks fine from
dma.c, the same page on kalloc's free list looks fine from kalloc.c, and
that it is on both is a fact no single subsystem holds.

    # schdbg whose 0x3e239000
    phys 0x000000003e239000   kernel va 0xffff80003e239000
      dma     arena, handed out
      pcidma  slot 2, 0 KB into a 4000 KB block given to pid 4 (vgpud)
      mapped  pid 4 (vgpud) at 0x000000004000d000  rwu  vma[5] no_free

      consistent: 1 owner, 1 mapping(s)

Claimants register the way views do -- one line in the file that owns the
data -- so the kernel image, the log region, the arena, the page allocator,
the pciuser DMA blocks and every page table each answer for themselves.
`mapped` is the one no allocator can answer: there is no reverse map, so
vm_walk_user() goes forward over every mapped page of every live process.

Two verdicts are shouted and everything else is reported as fact. More than
one owner means the second allocator to hand the page out is handing out
memory the first is still using -- the H2 bug, which would have printed as
three lines. Free-but-still-mapped means a page will be given away from
under the page tables that point at it. Deliberately *not* a finding: no
owner at all, because kalloc keeps a free list and no record of what it has
handed out, so an ordinary allocated page has nobody to speak for it and
saying otherwise would be the query crying wolf.

D4 -- watchpoints, on the four debug registers that had been sitting unused
since this kernel was written. Armed against the same framebuffer page and
then killing the driver:

    watch 0: 0xffff80003e239000 written, 8 byte(s), by stosq+0x1f, pid 12 vgpud
             #0  memset+0xba
             #1  dma_alloc+0x2e2
             #2  do_dma+0x22a
             #3  pciuser_ioctl+0x13b
             #4  sys_ioctl+0x3c7
             #5  syscall+0xf6

The chain is the answer, not the rip. It reports and continues -- a data
watchpoint is a trap, delivered after the store completes, so returning
carries on with the program none the wiser, which is what lets this be used
on a machine that is still running.

Debug registers are per-CPU and there is no general IPI here, so the table
carries a generation number and each CPU reloads from its timer interrupt
when it notices the number has moved: one comparison per tick, one tick of
latency at worst. `watch` prints which CPUs have caught up, because "this
watchpoint is watching" and "this watchpoint is watching one CPU" must not
look the same.

Also fixed while testing: watch_init() was called from mpmain(), which runs
on every processor, so the command appeared in the list once per CPU.
dbg_register() now refuses a duplicate name outright, so the next init that
runs per-CPU fails loudly in the list rather than quietly doubling it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 01:17:57 +02:00
Nexoniarz
1dd4ba0186 debugger: the kernel can be asked a question
docs/plan/debugger.md, milestones D0, D1 and D2. What they replace is the
ninety-second loop -- add a cprintf, rebuild, boot, read the serial log --
which answers exactly the one question you thought of before the rebuild.

The rule the shape follows: **it observes, it does not control.** No
stepping, no software breakpoints, no stopping the world. Half the bugs
this kernel produces are timing -- an interrupt storm, a level-triggered
line nobody acknowledges, a driver that faults only on its second start --
and every one of them disappears when you halt the machine to look. And
the layering rule, which is the circularity rule the display already has:
a debugger that needs lwIP cannot debug lwIP.

D0 -- symbols. tools/ksyms.pl turns the first link pass into a table the
second pass carries. Two passes is enough because .ksym is placed after
.text and .rodata, so carrying the table cannot move anything recorded in
it; the build lists both passes' text symbols and refuses to link if they
ever disagree, because a symbol table that is subtly wrong gives confident
false answers. ksym.c reads it through weak symbols, so pass one -- which
has no table -- still links. A crash chain now reads panic+0x5f <-
proc_sysrq_cmd+0x99 <- ... <- syscall+0xf6.

D1 -- a log that outlives the kernel. Every character through consputc()
lands in a byte ring with a timestamp per line, readable as /proc/kmsg.
It sits in a region carved before the page allocator gets anything, with a
magic header, so a kernel finds the previous kernel's log still there --
including the whole PSOGM report. panic.c's own comment said "there is no
core dump and no log to go back to"; that is no longer true.

  The obvious place for it is the top of RAM beside the DMA arena. That
  was the first attempt and the magic came back as ASCII on the reboot,
  because the top of usable memory is exactly where the firmware makes its
  own allocations. It lives above the kernel image instead, which is a
  stable address across boots of the same build.

D2 -- the introspection registry. A subsystem publishes its state with one
line at the bottom of the file that owns the data:

  dbg_register("dma", dma_dump, "the DMA arena's free extents");

Seven views -- dma, mem, proc, vma, claims, pci, sock -- reachable three
ways: sysrq 'g' (always, no process and no filesystem), /dev/dbg (echo a
line, cat the answer), and schdbg. The protocol is lines of text because
the same bytes have to work where nothing can allocate or frame a record,
and because a protocol you cannot drive by hand is one you cannot debug.
struct sbuf moved out of kernel/dev/procfs.c into include/sbuf.h rather
than being written a second time.

Several views exist because of a specific bug. `vma` is the table that
decides whether exit() frees a page, and the DMA ownership bug that made
this worth building was a block that was never in it.

Also fixed, found by building with clang for the first time in a while:
struct iovec was defined in both posix.h and socket.h, and every file that
included both was a redefinition. GCC 15 defaults to C23, which permits an
identical struct redeclaration, so the gcc path never noticed -- while
clang defaults to gnu17 and rejected it, breaking the one toolchain
shell.nix exists to provide and the UEFI loader requires. Both are now
guarded.

D3 (`whose <addr>`, the cross-subsystem ownership query) and D4 (hardware
watchpoints on DR0-DR3) are not built and are described honestly as
missing in the architecture doc's "What it does not do".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 00:58:45 +02:00
Nexoniarz
d1f50c4da3 hybrid: the driver is killed, and the driver comes back
H2 of docs/plan/hybrid.md -- the milestone the plan itself calls the one
that proves the whole idea, and the one that cannot be skipped.

    # cat /proc/schinit
    1 4 11 os.schos.vgpud
    # kill 4
    schinitd: restarting os.schos.vgpud
    vgpud: claimed
    vgpud: pid 8 drew a test pattern from userspace

The test pattern ends in a twelve-block tally of the drawing process's
pid, because a second run that redraws an identical picture is
indistinguishable from a first run that never stopped. Read off the
virtio-gpu scanout across four generations it says 4, 8, 10, 12, and the
DMA arena hands back the same physical address every time.

What it took:

* A halt the kernel can apply to a device it does not understand.
  Clearing PCI_CMD_BUS_MASTER is the only one there is, and it has to
  happen before the DMA goes back to the arena -- a dead driver's device
  keeps reading a framebuffer the kernel is about to give to somebody
  else. Claim sets the bit, release clears it; pcitest shows it in a bm
  column, with a third state so a failed read is never printed as off.

* A refusal. vgpu_release() asks vga_fb_restore() whether there is a
  framebuffer to put the console back on, and declines to hand over the
  device if there is not. The rule that the kernel keeps a minimal
  driver for everything on the path to a shell is worth writing down
  only if something enforces it.

* The DMA arena not being owned by two allocators at once. This is the
  bug that stopped H2: freevm() frees every mapped page below PHYSTOP
  and the arena is the top 16 MB of exactly that range, so a DMA block
  mapped into a driver went onto the page allocator's free list when the
  driver died, while pciuser_release_all() handed the same pages back to
  the arena. The restarted vgpud asked for its framebuffer, got pages
  kalloc() had already given out -- including its own page tables -- and
  dma_alloc()'s zeroing wiped them, so it died inside the ioctl on the
  return from a syscall whose stack had stopped existing. do_dma() now
  records a VMA with no_free set, the way shared memory does.

* One exit status. KeepAlive must restart a driver that crashed and must
  not restart one that has looked at the machine and found its device
  absent: on hardware with no virtio-gpu that was fifteen spawns in
  forty-five seconds, each printing a line to the console, for ever.
  SCHINIT_EXIT_NORESTART is 78, sysexits.h's EX_CONFIG. It is not a new
  manifest key -- the wait status has always travelled from PID 1 to the
  supervisor, and note_exit() simply stopped discarding it.

The milestone's third clause, "the compositor reattaches", is not done
and is not claimed: there is no compositor running. That is recorded in
the plan as a Schcom milestone rather than counted here.

Closes the register row "A released PCI device" in docs/plan/1.0.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 00:05:43 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c0ed23cc56 freeze: one register for everything half-built, and the corners cleared
The failure this is against is not scope creep. It is abandonment by promotion:
a thing gets built to the point where it works, the next thing becomes more
interesting, and the first is left in a corner -- in the tree, not finished, not
deleted, and not in any list. Enough of those and the tree stops matching its
own documentation.

docs/plan/1.0.md now holds the register, and it is the only place anything
half-built is listed. Four sections, because the kinds are genuinely different:
built and connected to nothing (the text layer, a font from disk, socket
activation, wait_vblank); started and stopped part-way (foundations 2-5, hybrid
H2, Schcom v0, a released PCI device that nothing brings back); named in a "what
it does not do" and still true; and frozen -- scoped, unstarted, not to be
started. The rule is that nothing enters except by being finished or deleted,
and that adding a row requires closing one.

1.0.md already said "two things in flight, never three". It was right and it was
not being followed.

Then the corners themselves, because a register written over a tree full of them
is just a longer list:

  - cmd/init is deleted. Nothing had execed /bin/init since initcode.S changed
    to /bin/schinit; it was built and installed on every image as an unreachable
    fallback, and an unreachable fallback rots rather than saves.
  - projects/schwm/ and projects/schde/ are deleted. Both said "to be deleted"
    in their own first paragraph, which proves only that a directory marked for
    deletion is not deleted by being marked. README-only, no code lost, and the
    arguments each made are moved into wayland.md where they are still true.
  - projects/schcom/schcom and schcom-demo were tracked binaries. Untracked, and
    .gitignore'd.

Three code comments and one document described a boot that has not happened
since 7d44eb7. cons_serial_only starts set, but kmain clears it on its first
lines now, so the splash does not survive the boot and the kernel log is on
screen from the start. That reversal was earned by a Chromebox with no serial
port freezing at boot showing nothing at all, and the comments still argued the
losing side of it.

The site:

  - a download page. One ISO, what it has actually been run on -- one machine,
    under test -- Ventoy and dd, what the first boot looks like step by step,
    and the build if you would rather. The support table names one Chromebox
    rather than listing hardware, because one Chromebox is the entire bare-metal
    record and a list would be fiction.
  - Assets/usb.svg, drawn to the same rule as the other marks: two tones,
    geometry only, the accent spent in one place, and that place is the activity
    light because it is the part that tells you something is happening.
  - Download is in both navs and is the hero's primary action; a closing band
    ends the front page on it.
  - the uberblock-slots and drivers-outside-the-kernel figures are gone. Three
    numbers left, including the fastfetch one, which stays because it is funny.

Two things caught by rendering the pages instead of assuming: .hero p was
beating .filemeta on specificity and the file line was coming out at body size,
and the dd command was one line long enough that the card clipped it at `conv=`
-- a destructive command that can scroll half of itself out of view is a good
way to take somebody's disk. It is two lines now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 20:28:05 +02:00
Nexoniarz
d3c37f82b6 docs: the tree moved and the documentation did not
The site and several documents still described the system as it was before
virtual terminals, the new schinit, the hybrid work and descriptor passing.

docs/architecture/init.md described the wrong program. It documented a single
schinit that parses manifests and supervises jobs, which has not been true since
PID 1 was split: PID 1 forks a supervisor, spawns jobs on its behalf and reaps;
the job table lives in /proc/schinit; a heartbeat runs both ways; and
proc_reincarnate() re-execs PID 1 in place rather than panicking. Rewritten
around what exists, keeping the reasoning that is still load-bearing -- the five
failures of the sibling-init scheme, the escalation ladder, and the three bugs in
the reincarnation path that each had to happen before they were obvious.

docs/plan/init.md is deleted, which is the tree's own rule for finished work and
had not been applied. Fourteen source comments referenced it by part number, so
they are repointed at the architecture doc by section name rather than left
dangling -- a deleted document nobody notices is worse than a stale one.

docs/architecture/devices.md gained the section it has been missing since
/dev/pci existed: what a driver needs from a kernel, why mmap is checked against
the caller's claims, why DMA is a call and not a mapping, and why the write back
after an interrupt is not optional. Also that a released device does not come
back by itself, which is true and was nowhere.

docs/architecture/networking.md gained a descriptor-passing section, and
docs/architecture/README.md's stack diagram gained the two layers and the third
seam it was missing. "Two seams hold the whole thing together" has not been true
since /dev/pci.

docs/plan/README.md said the hybrid work was deliberately last, on the argument
that an interface with no consumer is wrong in ways nobody can see. The argument
was right; the conclusion was not, and the document now says why it changed --
the alternative to a driver compatibility layer is writing a driver for every
device that exists, and the original objection is answered rather than ignored
because SchOS's own drivers are the consumers.

The site: a Hybrid section with the eviction transcript, cards for virtual
terminals, schinit and drivers outside the kernel, and the numbers remeasured
rather than estimated -- 46,961 lines, 207 syscalls. The boot log in app.js is
from a boot taken today, and the lines are trimmed to what the console can show
without clipping, each still a verbatim prefix of real output.

Two small rendering fixes found by looking at the pages rather than assuming:
.console pre's min-height is now scoped to the hero, so a static transcript sizes
to its content instead of reserving eight lines it does not have; and the docs
reader's contents panel strips inline marks from headings, so a heading written
`proc_reincarnate()` no longer carries its backticks into the sidebar.

Every intra-doc link checked; none broken.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 20:05:06 +02:00
Nexoniarz
9e6d8dd4e3 sockets: a descriptor can cross between processes
sendmsg/recvmsg with SCM_RIGHTS. Item 1 of docs/plan/foundations.md and
mechanism 1 of docs/plan/hybrid.md, which are the same primitive seen from two
directions: Wayland's wl_shm_create_pool passes a file descriptor with no
integer-shaped alternative, and handing a driver process the device it is
allowed to touch is the same act. Both plans stopped here.

Linux's structures byte for byte -- msghdr, cmsghdr, the CMSG_ macros -- because
the programs that need this are not ours. libwayland and toybox both call
recvmsg with Linux's headers and would not notice a friendlier door.

The delivery rule is the whole design. A batch of descriptors is pinned to the
stream position of the first byte of the message that carried it, and that has
two halves: a reader arriving at that position is handed them, and a reader that
has not reached it is stopped SHORT of it. Leave out the second half and a
program asking for 4096 bytes swallows three messages and is handed one
message's descriptors, with nothing in the result saying which. socktest checks
exactly that: two one-byte messages, an eight-byte read, one byte back.

The kernel holds a reference to every descriptor in flight, so a sender may
close its own copy the moment sendmsg returns. Giving that reference back is the
part that leaks if it is not written down, and there are three ways a message
ends:

  - received with room            installed in the receiver's table
  - received without room, or by
    plain read(2)                 closed; MSG_CTRUNC for the first case
  - never received, socket closed closed by sockclose

The middle row looks like a choice and is not: holding kernel references for a
receiver that has proved it is not looking is a leak with extra steps.

No garbage collector. A socket descriptor sent over that same socket and never
received holds a reference to the socket that holds the reference to it, and
neither close reaches zero. Linux carries several hundred lines for this.
Nothing on either plan passes a socket over a socket -- Wayland passes memory,
the driver work passes devices -- so it is a bounded leak that is documented
rather than a silent one.

Fourteen checks in cmd/socktest, and every one moves data through the descriptor
rather than inspecting it. The descriptor passed is always a pipe end, because a
pipe announces its own lifetime: a read of a pipe whose writers are all gone
returns 0, which turns "was the kernel's reference released" -- otherwise
invisible from userspace -- into a value a test can compare.

Two bugs fell out, neither in the new code:

  - sockpair() never set the socket's domain, so every socketpair() socket
    claimed domain 0. Invisible while the data paths asked only whether a socket
    was AF_INET or AF_NETLINK, since zero answers "neither" correctly.
    SCM_RIGHTS asks "is this AF_UNIX", and zero is wrong for that one.

  - pipe_poll() reports POLLHUP but not POLLIN at end of file, so a non-blocking
    read of a pipe whose writers had all gone returned EAGAIN forever instead of
    0 -- a program that polls and reads spins waiting for an end that already
    happened. sockreadable() always had the equivalent condition; the pipe path
    did not. Found because the test helper for "is this descriptor closed" is a
    non-blocking read of a pipe.

projects/schcom/README.md said SCM_RIGHTS was done for a long time while nothing
in the kernel implemented it, and an entire GUI plan was drawn on that line.
It is true now, which is not the same as it having been right, and the README
says so.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 19:49:37 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ea68ef4b54 hybrid: the GPU driver now runs in userspace
docs/plan/hybrid.md's first eviction. cmd/vgpud is the virtio-gpu driver as a
process: it finds the device by vendor and device id, asks the kernel for it,
and does the whole virtio 1.0 bring-up from outside -- reset, feature
negotiation, a virtqueue in DMA memory, GET_DISPLAY_INFO, RESOURCE_CREATE_2D,
ATTACH_BACKING, SET_SCANOUT, TRANSFER and FLUSH.

    vgpud: virtio-gpu at 00:03.0, currently held by virtio-gpu
    virtio-gpu: released to userspace; screen is the VBE framebuffer
    vgpud: claimed
    vgpud: display is 1280x800
    vgpud: scanout is ours, framebuffer at physical 0x3eceb000
    vgpud: drew a test pattern from userspace

Verified by screendumping the virtio-gpu head: the pattern is there, with a
checkerboard that would shear if the stride were wrong. The console carries on
in VBE on the other head at the same time, which is the fallback rule from the
plan working rather than being described.

No syscall knows this is a GPU. The kernel handed over a PCI device and the
process decided what it was -- which is the property that makes this a general
mechanism, and the reason the evictions come before anything foreign.

Four things the first real driver needed that the test program had not:

  - PCI config space (PCIIOC_CFG). A virtio device says where its registers
    are in vendor capabilities, which live in config space, so a driver that
    cannot read it cannot find its own registers.
  - a way for the incumbent to let go: struct pci_driver gained a release
    hook. A driver without one keeps its device, which is always safe and for
    anything on the path to a shell is also correct.
  - the outgoing driver freeing its DMA. Releasing the device but keeping its
    4 MB framebuffer is half a handover -- the incoming driver asks for one and
    is told there is no room.
  - a 16 MB DMA arena. 4 MB was exactly one framebuffer at this resolution,
    and either side of a handover there are two.

And one bug it reproduced on its first working run: vgpud polls the used ring,
so it registered no interrupt handler, and a virtio device interrupts on every
completion. The storm detector said so immediately --

    irq 11: 77780 interrupts/second -- a device on this line is not
    acknowledging it.  handler 'e1000' is attached

-- naming the line, the rate and the neighbour it was drowning. One line fixes
it (VRING_AVAIL_F_NO_INTERRUPT before the queue is enabled), and that detector
was worth every minute it cost.

include/virtio.h moved out of the driver directory. Its own comment said it
should when a second reader appeared; one has.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 18:27:41 +02:00
Nexoniarz
72074a960e hybrid: interrupts to userspace, and a crashed driver that stays crashed
docs/plan/hybrid.md mechanism 3. A process asks for a device's interrupts with
PCIIOC_IRQ and then reads them, which is how Linux's uio does it and for the
same reason: a descriptor composes with poll, and a driver that stops reading
falls behind rather than losing events. read() returns a count rather than a
flag, so a driver that was busy sees it missed three and acts once.

Proven against an e1000e by asserting a cause through its ICS register and
reading the interrupt back out in userspace:

    interrupts routed here (line 10)
    interrupt delivered, count = 1
    ICR = 0x80000004

0x80000004 is the cause the test set plus INT_ASSERTED -- the device's own
register, read by userspace as its acknowledgement.

**The masking is the design, not a detail.** A PCI line is level-triggered and
stays asserted until the cause is cleared at the device, which is a different
register on every chip and so is something only the driver can do. The kernel
masks the line on arrival and userspace's write() unmasks it. Signalling EOI on
a still-asserted line re-enters the handler immediately and for ever; this
kernel did exactly that by accident at 72,000 interrupts a second, and what it
looked like from outside was a clock running seven times slow (§13).

Which decides what happens when a driver dies mid-interrupt: the line is left
**masked**. The instinct is to unmask -- do not leave the device dead -- and it
is wrong, because unmasking an asserted line with no handler is a crashed
driver taking the machine down with it. Masked is safe and not permanent: the
next PCIIOC_IRQ arms it. Both halves verified by crashing a driver on purpose
and then starting another one.

A line already carrying kernel handlers is refused outright. Masking is
per-line, so handing out a shared one would silence whichever kernel driver is
also there, with nothing logged. MSI is the real answer and pci_msi_enable() is
already in the tree waiting for a caller.

Also fixed, found by running the crash twice: DMA buffers were never returned
when a process exited. The arena is 4 MB and contiguous, so a driver that
restarts a few times exhausted it -- "out of DMA memory, 3584 free" -- which is
a poor property for an interface whose whole promise is that a driver can crash
and come back.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 18:11:00 +02:00
Nexoniarz
24f79194ab hybrid: /dev/pci -- a driver can live outside the kernel now
docs/plan/hybrid.md mechanisms 2 and 4: MMIO and DMA to a process.

A process can enumerate the bus, claim a device exclusively, map its BARs and
get memory the device can be pointed at. Proven end to end against an e1000e
-- the exact device class we cannot drive and would want a foreign driver for:

    device 7: 8086:10d3 (network)
      claimed
      BAR0 at 0x81060000, 128 KB
      regs[0..3] = 0x00140261 0x00000000 0x00080283 0x00000000
      MMIO reaches the device
      DMA 8 KB at virtual 0x40001000, physical 0x3f8eb000

Those are the e1000e's CTRL and STATUS with full-duplex and link-up set, which
is how you tell a real mapping from one reading 0xFFFFFFFF off an unmapped
address. Claiming a device the kernel drives is refused -- two writers of one
register set looks like hardware that has started lying -- and everything a
process held is released when it exits, because a driver that crashed must not
keep its hardware away from its replacement.

mmap's offset is the BAR's physical address, checked against the BARs of
devices *this process has claimed*. Without that check the device is /dev/mem
with extra steps and a process could map the kernel's own memory. Mappings are
write-through: a cached write to a doorbell arrives whenever the cache feels
like it, which from a driver's side is indistinguishable from hardware that
ignores you.

The interface is about PCI devices, not about any driver model, and its first
users will be SchOS's own drivers when virtio-gpu is evicted. That ordering is
the design rather than an accident: an interface whose first consumers are
native drivers is a general mechanism something foreign can use later, instead
of a hole shaped like something foreign.

Also: PROT_* and MAP_* moved to include/posix.h. They were defined only in
sys_mem.c, so cmd/fbinfo carried a private copy and this wanted a third --
two copies of a number the kernel compares against, where a mismatch shows up
as a mapping with the wrong permissions rather than an error.

No IOMMU, so this isolates a driver against its own bugs and not against its
own DMA. The plan says so at length and it is still true.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 15:34:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
7d44eb75a3 console: put the kernel log on screen from the first line
Everything the kernel printed went to the serial port and nowhere else until
the first program started and called console_takeover(). On a machine with a
UART that is fine. On one without -- a laptop, a Chromebox, anything built
this century -- the screen showed the loader's progress bar and then nothing
at all, for the whole of boot, on exactly the machines where something was
going wrong.

A report of "it shows Loading SchOS and freezes" cannot be acted on. The same
boot with a log on it says which line it stopped after, and that is usually
the whole diagnosis.

The loader has already put a framebuffer on the screen and described it in the
boot block, so there was a perfectly good console sitting unused for the
entire early boot. kmain attaches it on its first line now.

Not gated on the F8 verbose menu, which was the first instinct and is wrong:
F8 is no use to someone whose machine resets before they can read anything.
This is what Linux does too -- the log is the default and `quiet splash` is
the thing you ask for. The splash survives until the kernel's first message,
and a boot that succeeds clears the lot when the shell starts, so the only
people who ever see this are the people who need to.

vt_init is idempotent now, because the early attach brings the terminals up
before main() reaches its usual call and the second one must not wipe six
screens of boot messages.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 14:59:14 +02:00
Nexoniarz
f9e68779ee ide: idewait spun for a minute on any machine with no legacy drive
The bound was 20,000,000 iterations, on the reasoning that a real drive
answers in microseconds so only an empty channel could reach the end. True,
and it misses what an iteration costs: every read here is a port access, and
under a hypervisor a port access is a VM exit at a microsecond or two.

Twenty million of those is a minute of the machine apparently doing nothing,
on every boot, on any machine with nothing on the primary IDE channel -- which
is every machine built in the last decade, where storage is AHCI or NVMe and
the legacy ports answer nobody. Booting the ISO looked like a hang for exactly
that reason: the line after "time:" took longer than anyone waits.

Bounded by time now, one second: four orders of magnitude more than a drive
needs, and short enough that an absent one costs nothing. "ide: no drive on
the primary channel" prints immediately.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 14:43:35 +02:00
Nexoniarz
0def474272 init: a hang is as detectable as a death, and PID 1 comes back
docs/plan/init.md milestones I2 and I3. The rule change.

**I2 -- the heartbeat.** The failure the two-init scheme could not see is that
an init usually does not die, it *hangs*: wait() never returns for a process
that is merely stuck, so a supervisor watching a wedged init reports
everything normal for ever. PID 1 now pings every two seconds and expects an
answer within ten; silence means stuck, and stuck is worth acting on.

Exercised rather than reasoned about, as the plan asks: `sysrq w` wedges
schinitd by making the scheduler pass over it for ever. It stays alive, keeps
its descriptors and appears in every listing -- which is the point.

Two things that only showed up by running it:

  - kill() sets a flag the target checks when it next runs, and the premise
    here is that it is not running. Waiting for a corpse that may never be
    produced turns the recovery path into a second hang. PID 1 replaces the
    supervisor *without waiting*; the old one's socket is closed, so the moment
    it runs again its first write fails and it exits.
  - the replaced supervisor must notice the hangup. poll() reports POLLHUP and
    never POLLIN again, so a loop that only looks for POLLIN sits there
    complaining that PID 1 has stopped pinging it.

**I3 -- proc_reincarnate().** exit() on initproc panicked. Now the kernel
tears down nothing, keeps pid 1, and re-execs /bin/schinit in place with a
generation counter. The pid stays 1, so every orphan the kernel reparented is
still correctly parented; the children survive; the open files survive, which
is why this is the first line of exit() and not the last; and the job table
survives in /proc/schinit, which is what it is there for.

The escalation ladder: generations 2-3 carry on, generation 4 ignores
/etc/schinit and starts a console shell only -- a manifest that kills init
must not kill it for ever -- and generation 5 stops, with PSOGM rendering
INIT_RESURRECTION_FAILED, a call chain and a QR code.

Three bugs found by running it, each a lesson about exec():

  - exec() returns 0 on success; it does not fail to return. The new image
    starts when the kernel returns to userspace through the rewritten
    trapframe. Returning from exit() is the success path.
  - exit() was reached because `killed` was set, and the trap path checks it
    again on the way out. Leaving it set exits the new image before its first
    instruction: five generations in a few microseconds, a resurrection loop
    that looks exactly like the crash it was meant to survive.
  - exec() keeps open files, which is what gives the new image a console --
    and also keeps the previous life's socket, holding the old supervisor's
    channel up so it never sees a hangup.

Verified: `sysrq i`, and the shell being typed into keeps its pid across the
death and rebirth of PID 1, with /proc/schinit byte-identical either side.

schfs-check passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 14:27:22 +02:00
Nexoniarz
d53602faf3 gfx: stop redrawing what already looks right
The console got slower the day TIOCGWINSZ started telling the truth.

`ESC[J` -- erase to end of screen -- arrives after every shell prompt, and zsh
redraws the prompt on every keystroke. While the terminal claimed to be 80x24
that erased 1920 cells; once it reported the real 160x50 it erased 8000, and
every one was written to the framebuffer whether or not it already looked
exactly like that.

Measured first, which killed the obvious theory: hoisting the bounds checks
out of gfx_draw_pixel changed a full-screen clear by 1%. The cost is not the
per-pixel function call, it is the framebuffer -- about 128 MB/s here, so four
megabytes is 32 ms of writing, and on a real window with QEMU rendering each
frame it is worse than that.

So write less rather than write faster. The grid already knows what is on
screen: erase_run compares before it draws and skips any row span already
blank in exactly those colours, and vt_clear does the same for the whole
screen.

    100x erase-to-end-of-screen, before   0.101s
    100x erase-to-end-of-screen, after    0.017s

Six times, with -display none where the framebuffer is ordinary RAM. This is
what the backing store is for: comparing is free, writing is not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 13:57:26 +02:00
Nexoniarz
bbc512a51c time: read the clock from the TSC, not from counting interrupts
A timer interrupt that arrives while interrupts are disabled is not delayed,
it is lost -- the LAPIC in periodic mode holds one pending interrupt and drops
the rest. So anything the kernel does with interrupts off for longer than
10 ms makes `ticks` run slow, and it never catches up.

That has now presented twice as "uptime is wrong": once as an interrupt storm
taking 83% of the CPU, once as heavy console output on a display that is
expensive to draw to. Both times the tick was the messenger, and both times it
looked like a timekeeping bug.

monotonic() reads the TSC instead. It is a counter in the silicon that
advances whether or not this kernel is paying attention, it is already
measured against the PIT at boot, and reading it is one instruction and no
lock. wallclock(), /proc/uptime, sysinfo, getrusage and times() all go through
it now.

`ticks` keeps the job it is good at -- the scheduler preempts on it, sleep()
counts it -- where losing one means a slightly longer sleep rather than a
wrong answer about what time it is.

Lost ticks are no longer harmful, which makes them invisible, which is worse.
So /proc/interrupts now says

    timer: 3383 ticks taken, 3387 expected

and names the gap when it grows, because a machine dropping timer interrupts
is spending too long with interrupts disabled, and that is worth knowing
before it turns into a clock that lies.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-13 13:57:26 +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
Nexoniarz
14f0e4d0e2 kernel: processes have an environment now, and zsh is the shell
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
2026-09-12 23:26:50 +02:00
Nexoniarz
9d4cdb44fc kernel: the clock ran 7x slow because the GPU never acknowledged its interrupt
fastfetch reported 3 seconds of uptime after 15 real ones, `time` claimed
3.12s for a 20-second command, and ping's one-second interval was closer to
six. One cause, not three: `ticks` was advancing at ~14.5 Hz instead of 100.

It was not the timer. virtio-gpu-pci shares IRQ 11 with the e1000 and
registered no interrupt handler at all. PCI INTx is level-triggered, so the
device held the line asserted, the kernel signalled EOI, and it fired again
immediately -- 72,000 interrupts a second, 83% of CPU0, starving the tick.
The e1000's handler read ICR as zero half a million times, correctly
answering "not mine", which is what made it look like a network-free problem.

Reading virtio's ISR byte clears it and drops the line. That is the fix.

irq_dispatch now measures each line's rate against the TSC -- not ticks,
which is the first casualty of a storm -- and names the attached handlers
once above 20000/s. It reproduces the original fault as a single line.

Found along the way, and fixed because they were real:

  - lapicinit loaded TICR with xv6's uncalibrated 10000000, whose own comment
    admitted it was never measured. calibrate_timers() now measures the LAPIC
    and the TSC against the 8254 PIT. (It came back at 999.9 MHz, so this was
    not the bug -- but the next machine is not obliged to be 1 GHz.)
  - microdelay() was an empty function body. Every microdelay(1000) in the
    xHCI reset path and the USB hub power-on sequence returned instantly.
  - HZ is a constant in param.h now, not the literal 100 written out at a
    dozen ticks-to-seconds conversions. USER_HZ is separate and deliberately
    does not follow it: musl answers sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK) with 100 always, so
    times() and /proc/stat scale at the syscall boundary the way Linux does.
  - TIOCGWINSZ answered a hardcoded 24x80. gfx_cols()/gfx_rows() have known
    the real geometry all along; at 1024x768 the console is 128x48, so every
    program that lays out a screen was formatting for the wrong one.
  - TCFLSH fell through to the catch-all `return 0`, claiming to discard
    input without discarding any.

uptime now advances 5.01 seconds per 5 real seconds. schfs-check passes.

Full investigation, including the two wrong hypotheses and the measurement
flaw that protected them, in docs/history/kernel.md section 13.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 21:34:36 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c874811679 fs: devtmpfs, so /dev is generated rather than written to a disk
A fresh boot spent 2600 ms in schinit's bootstrap() before printing its first
line, and the whole of it was device nodes. Measured rather than guessed: an
instrumented bootstrap reported 2600 ms on a fresh image and 0 ms on the next
boot, because the nodes already existed by then and mknod failed fast. The cost
was therefore invisible to anyone not building images -- which is to say,
invisible to everyone except whoever works on this.

Each node was a real inode on the root filesystem, and SchFS commits every
mutation as its own transaction group: a copy-on-write rewrite of the path to
the root, then an uberblock behind a cache flush. Twenty of those is seconds.

The duplication mattered more than the time. Major and minor numbers are the
kernel's -- devsw[] in kernel/dev/cdev.c is what they dispatch on -- and schinit
held a second copy of that mapping with nothing checking the two agreed. Adding
a character device meant editing a userspace program, and a wrong minor produced
a node that opened successfully and did nothing.

kernel/fs/devfs.c puts the table next to the thing it describes and serves /dev
behind the same fs_ops vtable procfs uses. The namespace is all it provides:
fileread and filewrite see T_DEV and go through devsw themselves, so a read
never reaches it. It is read-only, and dirlink and ialloc answer EROFS rather
than pretending -- a node exists because the kernel has the device, or it does
not exist.

This also makes /proc/filesystems true. It has advertised "nodev devtmpfs" for
as long as it has existed, against a kernel that had no such filesystem.

Two things found while measuring what remained:

  * The thirteen mknod() calls for /proc ran *after* the procfs mount, so every
    one was resolving a path into a read-only synthetic filesystem and failing.
    procfs.c's own note called them a fallback to be cleaned up later; they have
    been dead for longer than that.
  * The four mkdir() calls for mount points were the rest of it. They are made
    by the image builder now (sysroot-install), and the ones in init are a
    fallback -- a mkdir that fails because the directory exists costs a path
    walk and no writes, where creating one costs a transaction.

bootstrap() is now 0 ms on a fresh image, down from 2600.

init opens /dev/console after the mount rather than mknod'ing a node called
"console" into the root directory, which is what used to leave a stray /console
in `ls /`. The old path is kept as a fallback: if the mount fails there is no
/dev/console and no way to report it.

socktest passes, /proc still lists per-process directories, ps -e still
enumerates.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 20:18:30 +02:00
Nexoniarz
d97dd9ed90 net: the DHCP lease goes to the log, not over the user's shell
"net: eth0 10.0.2.15/255.255.255.0 via 10.0.2.2" arrived on the display seconds
after the prompt did, so the first thing anyone saw after booting was the kernel
typing into their session. It lands wherever the cursor happens to be -- in the
middle of a command, a fastfetch, or later a compositor's output.

console_takeover() hands the framebuffer to userspace on the first exec, and
after that the screen belongs to whoever is using the machine. cons_serial_only
already encodes that rule for the boot path -- "the display is the product; the
serial line is the diagnostics" -- and it starts set for exactly this reason.
What was missing is the rule for messages that cannot be timed to happen before
userspace starts, because they are waiting on a network.

klog() is that: the serial port only, whatever cons_serial_only currently says.
A macro rather than a function, because cprintf's varargs cannot be forwarded --
there is no vcprintf, and adding one to duplicate the formatter would cost more
than it buys. cprintf holds cons.lock for the whole message, so the flag cannot
be observed half-changed by another CPU printing at the same time.

Nothing is lost. The line still goes out the UART, which is where bootcheck
reads it from and where you want it when something is wrong, and a person who
wants to know their address reads /proc/netif.

Verified by screendumping the framebuffer after a boot and two fastfetch runs:
no interruption on screen, still one occurrence on serial.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 19:59:05 +02:00
Nexoniarz
1754cbf1aa console: a bare ESC[m is a reset, and OSC sequences are consumed
Two ANSI bugs, both found by running fastfetch rather than by reading the
parser, and both invisible to anything that spells its escapes out in full.

ESC[m with no parameters means ESC[0m. ECMA-48 is explicit that an omitted
parameter takes its default and SGR's default is 0, and sgr() iterated its
parameter list -- which is empty in exactly that case, so the loop body never
ran and the reset was silently dropped.

Programs emit the bare form constantly. fastfetch writes "\x1b[32m1%\x1b[m", so
everything after the first coloured character stayed green forever. With a
background colour it is much worse: its palette swatch sets a white background
and resets, the reset did nothing, and the console went white-on-white and
stayed there -- filling the screen with white rectangles as it scrolled, which
looks like a corrupted framebuffer rather than one missing branch.

OSC sequences were not a state at all, so ESC ] fell through and the payload
printed as text: a hyperlinked path arrived as "Disk (]8;;file:///\]8;;\)".
Nothing here acts on an operating-system command -- there is no window title and
no hyperlink to follow -- but *discarding* one is not optional, because the
alternative is printing somebody's URL into the middle of their output. ESC \
ends it, and an ESC followed by anything else is handed back to the escape state
rather than eaten, so a malformed OSC does not swallow the sequence after it.

Verified by screendumping the framebuffer after two consecutive fastfetch runs:
identical output both times, near-white coverage down from most of the screen to
2% (the palette swatch's own white cell), and the disk line reading "Disk (/)".

Also installs docs/branding/Ascii/ascii_50.txt as /usr/share/schos/logo.txt --
Shift as characters, at the width that leaves room for an info block on an
80-column console. Installed from the branding directory rather than copied into
sysroot by hand, so there is one source.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 19:38:00 +02:00
Nexoniarz
f395c39704 net: AF_NETLINK, so getifaddrs() works for everything and not just one program
fastfetch reported "getifaddrs(&ifAddrStruct) failed", and the right answer to
that is not a patch to fastfetch. Asking what interfaces a machine has is
something every networked program does, and on Linux there is exactly one way:
a NETLINK_ROUTE socket. musl implements getifaddrs() over it, so a libc call
that looks like a syscall is really a small protocol conversation -- and without
this side of it every caller fails the same way.

kernel/net/netlink.c is a responder rather than a general socket family. No
event stream, no multicast groups, nothing subscribes to link state: a request
arrives, the whole answer is generated into the socket's buffer, and reads drain
it. That shape is chosen, not a shortcut -- getifaddrs sends a dump and reads
until NLMSG_DONE with MSG_DONTWAIT, so generating at send time means a read
never blocks and the non-blocking flag is honoured for free.

RTM_GETLINK returns one RTM_NEWLINK per interface with IFLA_IFNAME and
IFLA_ADDRESS; RTM_GETADDR returns one RTM_NEWADDR per address with IFA_ADDRESS,
IFA_LOCAL and IFA_LABEL. Anything else gets a bare NLMSG_DONE, because the
caller's next move is a read either way and an unexpected error message is worse
than nothing to read.

The data is not netlink's. Interfaces come from the netdev class and addresses
from lwIP's netifs, exactly as /proc/netif reads them; nothing in the file knows
what an e1000 is. Interface indices matter more than they look -- getifaddrs
matches address records to link records by index, so the two dumps have to
agree. Loopback is 1, netdevs follow from 2.

Verified by reading it back through musl rather than by inspecting the bytes:

    lo     flags=0x49    fam=-1
    eth0   flags=0x1043  fam=17                    (AF_PACKET, the MAC)
    lo     flags=0x49    fam=2  addr=127.0.0.1  mask=255.0.0.0
    eth0   flags=0x1043  fam=2  addr=10.0.2.15  mask=255.255.255.0

Correct flags, addresses and netmasks, and the link records pair with the
address records.

One thing this does not close: fastfetch's Local IP module defaults to
default-route-only, which calls ffNetifGetDefaultRouteIfName() and reads
/proc/net/route. SchOS has no routing table and no such file, so the module
still shows nothing -- now for a reason that is about routing rather than about
enumeration. That is the next file to provide.

socktest still passes; the AF_UNIX and AF_INET paths are untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 19:23:34 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c4d4f20548 gfx: Guru on the crash screen, and the loader rebuilds when the logo changes
PSOGM drew ":(" -- two dots and a parenthesis. It now draws Guru, the icon from
docs/branding/: a chamfered head with two eye knockouts and a flat mouth, in the
:| register.

The old reasoning is kept in the file rather than deleted, because it is the
thing being traded away: ":(" was "legible as a mood without being a picture of
anything, and does not pretend the machine has feelings about what just
happened." That is a real argument and a face is a louder claim. What it buys is
identity -- ":(" is recognisably Microsoft's, and a crash screen is the single
screenshot most likely to leave the machine, so it is the worst place to be
wearing somebody else's face. The octagon also quotes the chamfered corners of
the old SchOS letterforms, which is the only part of that mark still in use.

Still drawn from primitives, for the original reason: it scales with the display
and costs no space in the kernel image. A scanline fill for the head, two
rectangles and one more knocked out of it -- no allocation, no locks, nothing
that can fail halfway, which is the whole constraint of panic context. The
geometry is expressed in the same 200-unit box docs/branding/guru.svg uses so
the two cannot drift without somebody editing a number on purpose.

The eyes and mouth are knocked out of the head rather than drawn on top of it,
which is what keeps them legible small: a hole in a solid reads at sizes a
stroke does not.

Verified by crashing on purpose -- echo c > /proc/sysrq -- and screendumping the
framebuffer through the QEMU monitor. The serial report still says ":(", and
should: Guru cannot be drawn in ASCII, and a mood marker in a log is not the
icon.

Separately, and found by looking at the boot splash rather than at the code:
boot/common/ui.c includes logo.h, theme.h and font.h, and the Makefile rule for
the loader listed none of them. A new logo therefore did not rebuild the loader.
The splash had been drawing a mask compiled six hours earlier while `make`
reported nothing to do, and the only symptom was a boot screen quietly
disagreeing with the kernel about what the logo is. The kernel half never showed
it because those objects are built with -MD -MP and track their own headers.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 18:28:23 +02:00
Nexoniarz
25530e7eed schfs: the allocation map can be given back, so unmount stops leaking it
Started as "fix the ASAN leak in schfs_objtest" and the test turned out to be
the messenger. The allocation map was taken through a palloc callback and there
was no way to return it: no schfs_space_release, and a comment in
schfs_space_init reading "caller frees what was taken" for an API the caller
did not have.

Three separate leaks from that one gap:

  * The kernel leaked the entire map on every unmount -- up to 2 MB, at 8 KiB
    per GiB of volume -- because kmount_unmount flushed, cleared `mounted` and
    walked away. This is the one that matters; the others are test-only.
  * schfs_space_init stranded a page on its own error path. npages was raised
    only after *both* of a pair of allocations succeeded, so a failure on the
    second left the first outside the count -- unreachable to any cleanup that
    could later exist.
  * schfs_objtest leaked 2121728 bytes in 518 allocations, which is what made
    the whole SchFS suite exit non-zero regardless of its assertions.

The map now carries its own pfree rather than taking one at release time, so it
can only ever be freed by the allocator that filled it -- the kernel's pages
come from kalloc and a host tool's from calloc, and the two are not
interchangeable. schfs_vol_open and schfs_vol_format release any map the volume
is already holding before building another, which is what stops a re-open
leaking; struct schfs_vol must therefore be zeroed before first use, and the
header now says so.

The test's own leak was the last one found and the simplest: it does
memset(&VOL, 0, sizeof(VOL)) before reopening, which wiped the map's pointers
before vol_open could release them. Eight of those, each now releasing first.

schfs_objtest asserts the balance -- 520 pages taken, 520 given back -- because
a suite that leaks cannot detect a leak: the filesystem's own allocations would
arrive as noise inside the harness's. The next one fails the run instead.

make schfs-check now exits 0. The 31 UBSAN misalignment reports are still
there and are still a Gate 0 item.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:49:57 +02:00
Nexoniarz
3034efd300 net: a frame wakes the stack, instead of waiting for the clock
The network thread waited on the timer and nothing else, so a frame that landed
just after a poll sat in the ring for up to 10 ms -- the largest fixed latency in
the system. That was deliberate when the stack was new (a receive path woken by
an interrupt is much harder to debug than one that is asked) and there is now a
working stack to compare against, which is exactly when it becomes safe to do.

The frame is still *pulled* by the thread through .receive. It has to be: a call
into lwIP can reach the driver, the driver can sleep on the buffer cache, and an
interrupt handler may do neither. netdev_rx_signal() delivers nothing and reads
no ring -- it only ends the wait early.

The wait stays on the timer tick rather than moving to a channel of its own, and
that is the design. lwIP's timers must still run when the link is silent, so the
clock has to remain a floor under the wait, and sleep() cannot wait on two things
at once. Joining the tick's existing wakeup costs nothing and leaves one wait
with one predicate.

rx_signal lives under tickslock for the same reason it gets no lock of its own:
sleep() releases tickslock atomically, so a driver setting the flag and waking
under that lock cannot lose the wakeup by arriving between the predicate test and
the sleep. A private lock would not be held across the sleep, and that window
would be back. Calling it from interrupt context is safe on the same terms the
timer handler already relies on -- acquire() disables interrupts, so a CPU
holding tickslock cannot be interrupted into it.

The e1000 signals on RXT0 (a frame or burst has landed) and RXDMT0 (the ring has
fallen below its threshold, which is when waiting for the clock hurts most).

Measured rather than asserted: /proc/netif reports wake_rx and wake_tick, and
across three pings rx_frames and wake_rx both went 2 -> 6 -- every received frame
woke the thread through the interrupt. wake_tick keeps advancing as the idle
floor, which is what lwIP's timers need. socktest still passes and ping is still
0% loss.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:23:46 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c362e308d0 net: the socket layer stops saying yes to things it did not do, and ping works
setsockopt was `return 0;` and getsockopt wrote a zero for whatever was asked.
The comment said it was so a server setting SO_REUSEADDR and treating failure as
fatal would not fail. That trade is the wrong way round: a caller told "no"
adapts, a caller told "yes" changes its behaviour on the strength of it -- sets
SO_RCVTIMEO and then blocks forever in a read it believes will time out, sets
TCP_NODELAY and reports latency numbers that measure Nagle. The failure is
silent, remote from the call, and indistinguishable from a bug in the stack.

Six options are honoured now and everything else is ENOPROTOOPT. SO_REUSEADDR,
SO_KEEPALIVE, SO_BROADCAST and TCP_NODELAY reach lwIP's pcb; SO_SNDBUF/SO_RCVBUF
are accepted and report the real size on read. SO_REUSEADDR is implemented rather
than refused precisely because of the original comment's concern -- it is the one
option a server really does set and really does check.

accept4 becomes its own table entry rather than an alias for accept. It has to
be: accept takes three arguments, so a shared handler reading a fourth register
reads whatever the caller last left there and invents a SOCK_NONBLOCK out of
stack litter. SOCK_CLOEXEC and SOCK_NONBLOCK are now honoured by socket(),
socketpair() and accept4() -- a dropped CLOEXEC leaks a listening socket across
every exec, and a dropped NONBLOCK has the caller block forever in what it
believes is a poll loop.

ICMP ping sockets: socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_ICMP), on lwIP's raw API,
with the callback stripping the variable-length IP header. Only echo replies are
eaten, and that restriction is load-bearing -- raw_input runs before lwIP's own
icmp_input, so consuming every ICMP message would swallow the echo *requests* and
this machine would silently stop answering pings from outside.

Loopback, so 127.0.0.1 is a real destination. LWIP_NETIF_LOOPBACK is the half
that is easy to miss: without it a packet addressed to an interface's own address
goes out of the wire and never comes back. With NO_SYS=1 nothing drains the
loopback queue, so the network thread calls netif_poll_all().

cmd/ping is first-party rather than toybox's, and the reason is a limitation not
a preference: toybox reads replies with recvmsg(2) and wants the TTL through an
IP_RECVTTL control message, and SchOS has neither. recvmsg is item 1 of
docs/plan/foundations.md, where it is wanted for SCM_RIGHTS anyway, and should
not be rushed to make one applet run.

Two bugs found on the way. Every AF_INET socket failed with ENFILE until DHCP
bound, because inet_new() demanded an *address* before handing out a socket and
reported it as "file table overflow"; net_is_ready() (lwIP up) is now distinct
from net_is_up() (DHCP bound). And that bug was hiding a bad test: socktest
asserted "AF_INET is refused, not faked", true when written, false since AF_INET
landed, and green the whole time because the suite runs before DHCP binds and the
ENFILE made the refusal look real. Fixing the kernel is what turned it red.

Verified: ping to 127.0.0.1, localhost, the gateway, 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9, all
0% loss; socktest ALL CHECKS PASSED with ten new checks, including a setsockopt
round trip and an unknown option that must be refused -- a permissive stub cannot
pass both at once.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:14:35 +02:00
Nexoniarz
fc0a7c6f4e fs: timestamps come from the clock, and /proc/fsstat says how full the tables are
Everything created after boot was stamped 1970. know() in SchFS and now_sec() in
the v1 filesystem both returned uptime(), under comments saying the kernel had no
wall clock -- which stopped being true when time_init() started reading the RTC.
The comments outlived the condition they described.

Two errors, and the second is the less obvious: uptime() counts 10 ms *ticks* and
they were being used as *seconds*, so a node created 0.6 s into boot read back as
00:01:00 and the clocks ran a hundred times too fast. Both now go through
wallclock(), which exists precisely so nothing can disagree with gettimeofday
about the time. Confirmed against the RTC line from the same boot.

The occupancy counters are the instrumentation docs/plan/roadmap.md asked for
while hunting the ls -lR hang: inode, file and pinned-buffer counts with a
high-water mark each, maintained at the 0->1 and 1->0 transitions rather than by
scanning, so they cost one increment on a path that already holds the table's
lock.

The peaks are the diagnostic. A live count only describes the moment you looked,
and a reference leak is invisible in it right up until the table is full -- at
which point iget() panics and filealloc() returns 0, which is where the trail
used to go cold.

What they measured: across ten iterations of ls -lR with writes interleaved, 33
execs and 13378 tree descents, inode_peak stayed at 9/200, file_peak at 9/512 and
buf_pinned_peak at 1/256, with the SchFS bracket unlocked throughout. That
eliminates the roadmap's own hypothesis -- "a lock or reference-count leak
somewhere in the *at() paths" -- and the hang did not reproduce. It is very
likely fixed in passing by the *at() dirfd rewrite, the getdents cookie rewrite
or SchFS becoming the root, all of which landed after it was reported.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:14:14 +02:00
Nexoniarz
73acc40dbb schfs: a format version policy, and refusing is not falling back
uber_valid() answered one question -- valid or not -- and a version mismatch
returned the same as a failed checksum. Those two states need opposite handling:

  A damaged uberblock means STEP OVER IT. That is what the 128-slot ring is for,
  and the older root is a consistent filesystem. This is crash recovery.

  A sound uberblock from a newer format means STOP. Falling back mounts a STALE
  filesystem: every commit made since the volume was upgraded is discarded, the
  mount reports success, and nobody finds out.

Demonstrated rather than asserted. A forged image with two uberblocks --
(version 1, generation 1, root 129) and (version 2, generation 2, root 130) --
made the old code mount root 129 and exit 0, silently rolling the filesystem
back to before the upgrade.

uber_check() returns BAD / OK / RO / TOO_NEW, and asks its questions in order:
is it ours (magic), is it intact (crc), can we read it (version, features), does
it make sense (root in range). Compatibility is asked before sanity on purpose --
the fields a sanity check reads are only meaningfully placed if the format is one
we know.

Plus feature flags in three classes, which is what stops a version number being a
blunt instrument: compat (ignore unknown bits), ro_compat (mount read-only),
incompat (refuse). The test for which class is one question -- what happens if a
driver that does not know this feature writes to the volume? Nothing -> compat.
Something goes stale -> ro_compat. Something is unreadable -> incompat.

They occupy what was reserved0, so every later field keeps its offset and
existing images -- which have zeros there -- read unchanged. schfs_vol_commit
memsets the uberblock before filling it in, which is why v1 volumes already say
"no features" without having been written by code that knew the field existed.
That trick is available exactly once. Four _Static_asserts now pin the layout.

Verified on forged images: version bump refuses, incompat refuses, blocksize
mismatch refuses, ro_compat mounts the NEWEST root read-only rather than falling
back.

Also here, because they are the same file: SchFS's transaction owner is a pid
alongside the pointer, since a bare struct proc * does not identify a process --
ptable slots are recycled, and an exited owner's pointer compares equal to
whichever unrelated process lands in that slot next, at which point klock() skips
the lock entirely and two callers share one volume's scratch pages. And
schfs_lockinfo(), so /proc/fsstat can report a wedged volume instead of leaving
every path asleep in acquiresleep with no way to ask why.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:13:59 +02:00
Nexoniarz
3eed58fe9b kernel: holdingsleep asks who holds the lock, not whether anyone does
int r = lk->locked;                              // before
    int r = lk->locked && lk->pid == myproc()->pid;  // after

Seven callers, and every one of them is an assertion of the form

    if (!holdingsleep(&b->lock)) panic("brelse");

whose entire purpose is to catch a process releasing a lock it never took.
Answering the weaker question disarms all of them: iunlock() on an inode locked
by another process, and brelse() on somebody else's buffer, both sailed through
and unlocked it underneath the real holder. Two processes then believe they hold
the same inode, and the corruption surfaces somewhere else entirely -- which is
exactly the shape of bug these panics exist to prevent.

Found while hunting the ls -lR hang. It is not proven to be that hang's cause,
and the instrumentation in the next commits says it is probably not. It is a
real defect regardless, and it re-arms the detector that would catch the rest.

myproc() is null on the boot path before the scheduler runs and acquiresleep()
stores 0 for that case, so this compares the same way rather than dereferencing
null. Checked that nothing touches a buffer that early, so the stricter
assertion cannot fire spuriously on boot.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:13:59 +02:00
Nexoniarz
57aff40228 docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap
docs/ was ten files where a plan, a description, a guide and a bug report all
sat next to each other. It is now architecture/ (what SchOS is), plan/ (what it
will be), guides/ (how to work on it) and history/ (why it is like this), with
an index that states the one rule holding it together: when something is
finished it moves from plan/ to architecture/ and is rewritten as a description
of the thing rather than a record of building it.

A ticked checkbox says the work happened. It does not say what the work
*produced*, and six months later the checkbox is all that is left. The network
stack proved the point: finished, verified end to end, and for a month the only
description of it anywhere was a checkbox four levels of indentation deep.

So roadmap.md went from 534 lines to 181 -- nothing deleted, the done work
graduated. Seven subsystems that were finished and undescribed now have
descriptions: boot, kernel, syscalls, filesystem, networking, graphics, usb,
init. Every one ends with "What it does not do", which is the section that pays;
a document listing only strengths is marketing, and the reader who needs it most
is the one about to trip over a limitation nobody wrote down.

schfs.md still opened with "phases 1 through 3 1/2 are done, phase 4 is next"
long after all five had landed. It is a description now, with the phase record
and the hard-won bugs moved to history/.

Three corrections found on the way, all load-bearing:

  * projects/schcom/README.md claimed SCM_RIGHTS was done. There is no
    sendmsg/recvmsg in the kernel at all, and an entire GUI plan rested on it.
  * The root README said "No TCP/IP" months after the stack landed.
  * history/kernel.md sec.7 was marked "in progress" on a problem that process
    groups solved.

Also adds plan/1.0.md, which draws a finish line so the open list stops being
infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is
the window manager, so that split dissolves rather than being abandoned.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
Nexoniarz
817d666068 gfx: the console and the crash screen stop drawing on a driver by name
Same disease as the network stack, one subsystem over. kernel/dev/vga.c
was three things wearing one name: the owner of the framebuffer, a
bitmap drawing library, and the text console. Only the first is a
driver, and because they shared a file they shared a prefix -- so
panic.c drew the crash screen with vga_fill_rect, console.c printed with
vga_putc, /dev/fb0 handed out vga_fb_phys, and every one of those files
named a display driver it had no business knowing about.

Split three ways:

  - kernel/drivers/gpu/vga/vga_fb.c owns the VBE framebuffer -- the mode
    the loader programmed and handed over, the aperture, and the display
    class vtable. It is a driver and now lives with the driver that
    finds the card on the bus.
  - kernel/dev/gfx.c draws: pixels, shapes, glyphs, the cursor, scroll,
    the ANSI erase operations. It names no driver. The framebuffer
    arrives through gfx_attach_scanout(), so a driver publishes what it
    owns and this file draws on it without knowing what it is.
  - include/gfx.h is the interface, and says why it is deliberately not
    the display class: that one is about frames -- acquire, present,
    vblank -- and the crash screen has to work when nothing else does.

main() no longer calls a display driver. platform_register_devices()
takes the framebuffer address and brings up whatever owns it, which is
where driver names belong; kernel/drivers/registry.c is the file whose
entire job is naming every driver in the kernel.

virtio-gpu got the e1000 treatment as well: instances in an array, the
instance hung on dev->priv by an `attached` hook, and every op reading
it rather than a file-static. It refused the second adapter outright
before, which is not hypothetical -- integrated plus discrete is an
ordinary laptop. The VGA driver deliberately has no such hook, and says
so: there is one framebuffer the loader programmed however many
VGA-class controllers the bus turns up, and a second one publishing the
same scanout is the truth rather than a bug.

Private headers moved next to their drivers: include/virtio.h and
include/xhci.h each had exactly one includer. include/ is for headers
the rest of the kernel needs.

Deleted rather than moved: consoleinit() programmed the sixteen ANSI
colours into the VGA DAC and disabled text-mode blink, by writing ports
0x3C0-0x3C9 from the console. The comment three lines above the colour
table already said this does nothing in a 32bpp linear mode -- there is
no palette to index -- so it was both dead and in the wrong file.

Verified, and this is a refactor so the evidence is that nothing moved:
  - bootcheck -Fb -Net: 59 [ok], no failures. That covers the console
    through every command, /dev/fb0's geometry, writing pixels through
    write() and mapping the framebuffer through mmap.
  - make crashshot: the crash screen renders exactly as before --
    shapes, glyphs, logo and QR code -- which is the whole of gfx.c
    exercised at once, in a panic, with the scanout attached by a driver.
  - make schcom-test: five pixel assertions from the host oracle still
    pass, so the display class and the compositor above it are unmoved.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 17:04:10 +02:00
Nexoniarz
20cc673a41 net: a network *class*, so the stack stops knowing what an e1000 is
The TCP/IP stack reached straight into the first driver anyone wrote.
net.c called e1000_present(), the lwIP glue was named netif_e1000.c and
called e1000_transmit(), and include/defs.h declared the driver's
internals to the whole kernel. The second NIC driver would therefore
have arrived with a near-identical copy of the glue file and a patch to
the protocol stack, which is the arrangement include/device.h was
written to prevent -- the e1000 even said so, with `.ops = 0, // no
class vtable yet; there is no net class`.

There is now. A driver publishes a struct netdev_ops -- transmit,
receive, mac, link_up -- and is finished: it never mentions lwIP, and
nothing above it learns its name. The display class was already this
shape; this is the same shape for networking, and the two now read the
same way in kernel/dev/device.c.

What that made possible immediately:

  - One netif per bound device instead of one per driver. lwIP's glue is
    netif_eth.c, it takes a struct device, and it holds up to NETIF_MAX
    interfaces. net.c attaches every network device it finds and starts
    DHCP on each, because which interface the network answers on is not
    ours to decide.
  - /proc/netif lists all of them, one block of fields each, with the
    interface name and the driver that claimed it.
  - The ARP self-test moved from the e1000 to the class. Nothing in it
    was chip-specific, and it is the first thing anyone will want to run
    against the next driver. Still `echo n > /proc/sysrq`.
  - Private headers live with their driver: e1000.h was in include/,
    where exactly one file could use it. The driver build now adds the
    driver's own directory to the include path.

The e1000 also drives more than one card. Its probe() refused the second
outright, because there was a single static instance -- so a machine
with two of them drove one and silently ignored the other. Instances are
an array now, and the instance is hung on dev->priv by a new optional
`attached` hook that the bus calls once the device exists. probe() runs
before device_add(), so there was previously nowhere to put it; that is
the whole reason the hook exists rather than a line inside probe.

QEMU gets an explicit NIC on every target (QEMU_NET). The default device
happens to be an e1000 on this machine type today, which is exactly the
sort of thing that stays true until a QEMU release changes it and the
network stops being exercised without anyone noticing.

Verified:
  - bootcheck -Net passes, 48 [ok], no failures -- including the moved
    self-test and two new checks that /proc/netif names both the
    interface and the driver behind it, which together say the stack
    went through the class rather than through a driver it was compiled
    to know.
  - Two NICs attached by hand (-device e1000 twice, second with its own
    MAC): eth0 and eth1 both attach, each reports its own MAC in
    /proc/netif, and each gets its own DHCP lease. Before this commit
    the same machine produced one interface.
  - make schfs-check still passes in full.

One trap worth recording: moving a header broke the build for anyone
with stale .d files -- make stopped with "No rule to make target
'include/e1000.h'". CFLAGS gains -MP, which emits a phony target per
header so a moved or deleted one can never wedge the build again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 16:42:34 +02:00
Nexoniarz
a9ff1166b5 net: recvfrom says who sent it, and a datagram is delivered whole
The second of the two things the stack owed. recvfrom accepted the
address arguments and ignored them, so every caller was told nothing
about where a datagram came from -- which for UDP is most of the point:
a server that cannot see the sender cannot reply to it.

Fixing it properly meant fixing something worse that was sitting
underneath. UDP payloads went into the same byte ring TCP uses, with no
record of where one datagram ended and the next began, so two datagrams
that arrived together came back from one read as one. That is a bug
whose appearance depends on timing and whose blame lands on the sender.

Datagrams now carry a header alongside the bytes: source address, source
port, length. Sixteen of them per socket, in a ring beside the existing
one. Whole buffers would have been 16 sockets x 16 datagrams x an MTU of
static memory for something almost always empty; only the boundaries need
keeping, and those are eight bytes each. A datagram too big for the
buffer it is read into is truncated and the remainder discarded, rather
than left in the ring to be delivered as the head of the next one. One
that arrives with the queue full is dropped whole -- that is UDP's own
contract, and half a datagram in the ring would corrupt every one after.

An empty queue and a zero-length datagram are kept apart, because a
sender really can send zero bytes and the right answer to that is 0
rather than "nothing has arrived yet".

sendto grew the mirror image: a destination address on a datagram
socket, which is what a server replying to whoever just wrote to it
needs. On TCP a destination is ignored rather than refused -- the
connection decides where the bytes go, and programs pass one out of
habit. For a stream, recvfrom's source is read from the pcb: it is the
peer, and it is the same answer for every byte.

Verified: bootcheck -Net now covers UDP too, 45 [ok] and no failures.
The address check is real rather than cosmetic -- nettest deliberately
leaves its sockaddr uninitialised, so a kernel that filled in nothing
would print stack rubbish instead of 10.0.2.2 and the port the responder
is actually on. The boundaries are checked by byte count: the responder
sends 20 bytes and then 16, and the guest reports reading 20 and then
16. Treated as a stream the first read would have taken all 36.

Left for later, and deliberately: accept() still does not report the
peer's address, and getsockname/getpeername do not exist.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 16:23:06 +02:00
Nexoniarz
3ad8114208 net: a blocked socket sleeps until something happens, rather than every 10 ms
The AF_INET blocking paths -- connect, accept, read and write -- woke on
every timer tick and looked to see whether anything had changed. That is
a wakeup per blocked socket per 10 ms whether or not the network did
anything, and it answers late even when the data was already sitting in
the buffer.

What stood in the way was a lock mismatch, and it is written down in the
file now because it is the reason this is not simply sleep on the socket:
sleep() wants a spinlock, and the lwIP lock is a sleeplock -- it must be,
since a call into lwIP can reach the driver and the driver can sleep.
Nor can a waiter hold the lwIP lock while sleeping, or the network thread
could never deliver the thing it is waiting for.

So the wait is on a counter with a spinlock of its own. A waiter reads
the counter while it still holds the lwIP lock, right after checking its
condition, then releases and sleeps only if the counter has not moved.
The lwIP callbacks bump it and wake the channel. No wakeup can be lost:
anything that changes a condition does so after the reader's snapshot,
and therefore bumps the counter after it too, and the sleeper re-checks
under the spinlock before committing.

One counter and one channel for all sixteen sockets rather than one
each. Waking a socket with nothing to do costs a few instructions, and a
per-socket channel would have to be torn down in close() against
callbacks that can still arrive -- which is a use-after-free waiting to
be written.

tcp_sent is registered now, on both connected and accepted pcbs. It was
not needed while writes woke on the clock; with this change a write
blocked on a full send buffer would otherwise sleep with nobody left to
wake it, because an acknowledgement is the only thing that frees space.

Verified: bootcheck -Net passes, 38 [ok], no failures. It exercises the
path that matters -- nettest blocks in read() until the host answers, and
the host answers only after reading what the guest sent, so the wakeup
comes from a callback and not from a tick that would have fired anyway.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 16:15:27 +02:00
Nexoniarz
f46fb41966 test: the network is checked by the suite now, and /proc/netif says what it did
The TCP/IP stack landed with its end-to-end test performed by hand: start
a listener, boot, type nettest, read the output. That is evidence once
and nothing afterwards, and it is exactly the kind of check that quietly
stops being run.

bootcheck -Net does the whole exchange. A listener runs on this host on a
port picked by binding one and letting go, the guest is told to connect
out to 10.0.2.2 at that port, and both ends are asserted: the guest
reports what it received, the listener reports what arrived. One side
alone proves much less than it looks -- a stack that completes a
handshake and then drops every byte satisfies any check made from inside
the guest.

The listener is a background job, a separate process, because this
harness has one hard rule: nothing may block the writer feeding QEMU's
stdin. A socket accept is precisely the wait that deadlocked two earlier
attempts at reading QEMU's output. It answers the protocol nettest
speaks and then closes -- the close is load-bearing, since nettest reads
until end of file and a listener that stayed open would hang the guest
rather than fail it.

The NIC is spelled out (-netdev user + -device e1000) rather than left to
QEMU's default. Other runs can take the default and still answer "did a
driver bind"; a run that asserts on an address should be reading its own
configuration.

/proc/netif is new, and the address is why. Until now the only report was
a line on the console at boot, which userland cannot read and a test can
only find by scraping the transcript. It gives interface, MAC, state,
address, netmask, gateway, MTU and frame counts. Named netif rather than
net on purpose: /proc/net is a *directory* on Linux, and a plain file
there would give ENOTDIR to anything reaching for /proc/net/dev, which is
worse than not having it. The counters are kept at the lwIP seam rather
than in the driver, because a frame the driver received and the netif
dropped never reached the stack.

Verified: 38 [ok], no failures. Eleven of them are new -- lwIP up, DHCP
obtaining 10.0.2.15 from SLIRP (a number nothing in the guest knows in
advance, so it is the exchange completing rather than a guess), the four
/proc/netif fields, frames counted in both directions, the handshake, the
reply read back, and the listener confirming HELLO-FROM-SCHOS arrived.

One bug found by writing it: $netPort was chosen after the command list
was built, so the guest ran `nettest 10.0.2.2` with no port and printed
its usage. An unset PowerShell variable interpolates to nothing rather
than failing, which is worth remembering next time a command in this
file looks right and behaves oddly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 16:11:49 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c0806d1b64 net: a TCP/IP stack, and AF_INET on the sockets that were already there
lwIP 2.2.0, fetched by ports/lwip and compiled straight into the kernel.
Not written from scratch, and the reason is not the packet formats: it is
congestion control, retransmission, window management and twenty years of
corner cases that only show up against a real peer. Not FreeBSD's
netinet either, though the licence would have allowed it -- that stack is
not a library, it reaches into mbufs, epoch(9), netisr, VNET and uma(9),
so adopting it means porting FreeBSD's kernel infrastructure first. lwIP
was written for exactly this situation: a small kernel with a raw
Ethernet driver and a port layer of a few hundred lines.

It is kernel code, so nothing is installed into the sysroot and there is
no second build system: the top-level Makefile compiles the files it
wants against our port headers. The file list is explicit rather than a
wildcard, because lwIP ships IPv6, 6LoWPAN, PPP, SLIP, DNS-SD and a dozen
apps in the same tree, and building what is not configured yields either
dead code or a link error naming a port function nobody meant to write.
Its sources are unmodified and its warnings are silenced for its files
only -- patching them would mean maintaining a fork.

The port layer is ours: a lock, a clock, the netif that hands frames to
e1000, lwipopts.h, and a shim/ directory of tiny headers so lwIP's
<string.h> and friends resolve to the kernel's functions instead of the
host's, whose prototypes disagree and would otherwise be found on the
default include path.

NO_SYS=1, so lwIP has no threads of its own and one kernel thread feeds
it. A thread rather than the interrupt handler, because a call into lwIP
can reach the driver, the driver can sleep, and an interrupt handler
cannot -- so the interrupt still only clears the cause register and the
thread polls. kthread_create is new and generally useful: a process with
a kernel-only page directory, no files, no cwd, no parent, dispatched
from forkret, which can therefore sleep and be preempted like anything
else. DHCP obtains an address at boot and the console says which one.

AF_INET went in exactly where phase 2 said it would. socknew dispatches
on the domain, kernel/net/inet.c implements the internet side on lwIP's
raw API, and not one syscall changed shape: bind, connect, listen,
accept, read and write reach the same descriptors they always did. TCP
and UDP both work. cmd/nettest opens a connection, writes, and reads the
answer back.

Two things are owed and named here so they are not discovered later:
recvfrom does not yet report the source address, and the socket paths
poll on the timer tick instead of sleeping on the socket. Both are
follow-ups, not redesigns.

NOTICE carries lwIP's BSD-3 text. Clause 3 is no-endorsement, not the
old advertising clause, so it sits with Apache-2.0 without difficulty.

Verified: the tree builds clean, and the headless boot check passes with
27 [ok] and no failures with the stack compiled in and the thread
running -- which is the part that would break first if netinit deadlocked
or the thread starved anything. An end-to-end connection test belongs in
that suite and is the next commit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 16:02:48 +02:00
Nexoniarz
03cc316001 schfs: the commit barrier, reflink, and attributes with an index over them
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>
2026-08-15 16:02:02 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ad2b321d56 dev: raw disks are 64-bit, so a real drive stops wrapping at 4 GB
struct file already carried a uint64 offset and bread already took a
uint64 block number. The narrowing was one boundary in the middle:
devsw's read and write took a 32-bit uint, so fileread passed a 64-bit
f->off into a 32-bit parameter and the top half was discarded.

The effect was not a refusal at 4 GB but silent wraparound past it. A
read at 5 GB returned the bytes at 1 GB, reporting success. disk.c had a
DISK_MAX_BYTES constant documenting the limit, and nothing anywhere
referenced it -- the cap was described but never enforced, which is the
worst of the three options.

The signature is now uint64 across all nine files that carry it, and
diskread/diskwrite no longer narrow the block number on the way to
bread. Widening this is a prerequisite for NVMe and for any real disk:
namespaces start well above 4 GB and the failure mode reads valid data
from the wrong place.

Verified end to end rather than by inspection. A 6 GB sparse image with
"PAST4GB-MARKER-OK" written at byte 5368709120, attached as /dev/hdb to a
ramdisk-root kernel so device 1 was free:

  # dd if=/dev/hdb bs=4096 skip=1310720 count=1 | od -c | head -2
  0000000   P   A   S   T   4   G   B   -   M   A   R   K   E   R   -   O

Under the old code that offset truncates to 1 GB, where the image is
zeroes. The whole path is exercised: f->off, devsw, diskread, bread and
ide.c's LBA48.

Worth recording for next time: `make ramroot` stages the ESP itself, and
running `make esp` afterwards rebuilds the kernel without RAMROOT and
silently undoes it. The tell is a 855 KB kernel where a 25 MB one is
expected.

110 [ok], no failures, on the default build.
2026-08-11 12:15:38 +02:00
Nexoniarz
0500e4382d boot: one hand-off contract, defined once
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>
2026-08-10 21:37:36 +02:00
Nexoniarz
b34779111a schfs: several snapshots at once, and unmount gives the slot back
Two loose ends from the mount-by-name commit, both closed.

A slot is a device number, so supporting more than one snapshot is a
small array rather than a redesign: SCHFS_SNAP_DEV through
SCHFS_SNAP_DEV + SCHFS_SNAP_SLOTS - 1, each with its own volume and its
own scratch pages, allocated on first use. Four of them -- "one at a
time" is an odd thing to have to explain, and the cost is two pages per
slot. Not many, because each one is a device number and those are a
small fixed space.

The leak mattered more. umount removed the mount table entry and left the
slot marked in use, so a snapshot could be unmounted and then never
mounted again until reboot. sys_umount2 releases it now, keyed off the
device it already has in hand.

Verified in the running system: two snapshots mounted at once, both
readable, both unmounted, and a third mount afterwards succeeds and reads
correctly -- which is the case that failed before.

schfs-check passes; bootcheck 108 [ok].

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 21:30:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
3919f1446e schfs: mount a snapshot by name, read-only
`mount -t schfs @golden /mnt` mounts a snapshot. The source argument
finally means something: sys_mount ignored it outright, because there was
one volume and nothing to choose between. `@name` rather than a path
because a snapshot is not a device -- there is no node in /dev for it and
there should not be, since it lives inside the volume already mounted.

A second volume rather than a parameter threaded through all 23 schfs_k*
entry points. Only the read side can ever address it, so the write path
keeps talking to the live volume and needed no change; the four read
entry points grew _dev variants and pick the volume from the device the
inode already carries. One fs_ops table serves both, because every entry
takes an inode and dispatches on it -- a second table would be the same
pointers under a different name.

It needs its own device number: a snapshot's object ids are the *same
numbers* as the live tree's, so one device would make the two views alias
in the inode cache and hand a reader whichever was cached first.

Three things this turned up, none of them new but all of them reachable
for the first time:

  - sys_mount refused with `dev == SCHFS_DEV`, meaning "do not mount SchFS
    onto SchFS". A snapshot's mount point is necessarily on the live root,
    so that refused the entire feature. The real condition is mounting a
    device onto *itself*, which is `dev == fsdev`.
  - createat allocates an inode and then panics if dirlink fails --
    reasonable about a writable filesystem, a crash on a read-only one.
    The refusal now happens before anything is allocated. Unlink and
    rename already handled a refusal properly.
  - a refused create reported ENOENT, so writing to a snapshot said "No
    such file or directory" -- the sentence a shell prints for every
    create failure. It reports EROFS now.

Verified in the running system against an image built with
--snapshot golden: the mount succeeds, ls lists the snapshot's tree,
/mnt2/etc/motd reads back through it, and a write is refused with
"Read-only file system".

One at a time, and no umount path for it yet: mount_del_by_root removes
the mount table entry, but ksnap_unmount is only called on the failure
paths. schfs-check passes; bootcheck 108 [ok].

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 21:10:59 +02:00
Nexoniarz
6e2e9e8d05 schfs: snapshots
A snapshot is a tree root that is kept. The B-tree is copy-on-write, so
the blocks a committed root reaches are already immutable -- nothing
overwrites a block a committed tree can reach -- and retaining one costs
a record: (SNAP_OBJECTID, KEY_SNAP, id) -> struct schfs_snap.

The record names the root as it was *before* the record was added.
Inserting it rewrites the path under copy-on-write and produces a new
root, so a snapshot that included its own creation would name a block
nobody had written yet.

What makes it survive is the derivation. There is no free-space map on
disk; it is rebuilt at mount by walking the tree, and that walk now
covers every snapshot root as well as the live one. Without it a block
reachable only from a snapshot looks free, gets handed out, and
overwrites the data the snapshot exists to keep -- silently, surfacing
only when the snapshot is read. A snapshot's own tree may hold older
snapshot records; those are deliberately not followed, or deleting a
snapshot could be undone by an older one's memory of it.

Runtime frees are suspended while a snapshot exists. Knowing which freed
blocks a snapshot still needs requires per-extent reference counting,
which is a design and not a flag; until that exists the safe answer is to
free nothing and let the next mount's derivation reclaim what is
genuinely unreachable. Allocation is unaffected and stays correct -- it
works from the in-use bitmap the derivation filled. The running
free-blocks *counter* does drift from the truth while a snapshot is
present, which is cosmetic and is reported by the test rather than
asserted away.

Tested in schfs_objtest: after a snapshot, the live tree shows new
contents while the snapshot still shows the old ones; a file deleted from
the live tree is still readable through the snapshot; deleting the
snapshot removes the record and the space comes back at the next mount.

schfs-check passes including the round-trip; bootcheck 108 [ok].

Not yet: snapshots are not reachable by name from userspace -- there is
no mount-a-snapshot path, so this is the format and the mechanism, not
the feature a user sees.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 19:10:24 +02:00
Nexoniarz
527e6eac42 Raise the disk ceiling: 64-bit blocks, no FSSIZE panic, LBA48
SchFS is a 64-bit format addressing 64 ZB. The stack under it was not,
and the lowest limit was three orders of magnitude below the one anybody
would have guessed:

  ide.c   panicked on any block >= FSSIZE -- 150000 blocks, 614 MB
  ide.c   computed the sector in an int, and addressed it with LBA28
  bio.c   took a 32-bit block number, capping any device at 16 TB
  schfs   refused blocks past 0xffffffff, mirroring the cache

The FSSIZE check is the one that mattered. FSSIZE describes the size of a
v1 filesystem *image*; it had no business bounding a physical device, and
it meant a disk larger than half a gigabyte panicked the kernel rather
than being read.

struct buf's blockno is uint64 now, and so is bread's. idestart computes
the sector in 64 bits and picks LBA48 when it does not fit in 28 -- per
request, so everything that fits stays on the LBA28 path every existing
image has been read through. The 48-bit registers are written high half
first, because each is a two-deep FIFO and the other order leaves the
drive addressing whatever the low bytes alone describe.

Verified with a 2 GB disk carrying a marker at 1 GiB -- block 262144,
well past the old panic at 150000. The guest reads it back:
"MARKER-PAST-THE-OLD-LIMIT". schfs-check passes including the round-trip;
bootcheck 108 [ok].

Two limits deliberately left, both noted rather than guessed at: raw
/dev/hdN access still goes through devsw's 32-bit offset, so a raw device
is addressable to 4 GB; and usb_storage computes a 32-bit LBA, which is
what SCSI READ(10) carries -- READ(16) is a different command, not a
wider variable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 18:50:31 +02:00
Nexoniarz
8b7b8df74f usb-hid: bind an absolute pointer, and plumb EV_ABS through
Groundwork for usb-tablet, which is the fix for the guest cursor and the
host's never being in the same place: a PS/2 mouse reports how far it
moved, two pointers accumulating deltas independently drift apart, and no
amount of care in the compositor can make them agree. An absolute device
reports where it is, so they coincide by construction.

  - the HID driver no longer matches the boot subclass only. usb-tablet
    declares subclass 0 and was refused at the door; hid_probe decides
    what an interface actually is, and still declines what it cannot make
    sense of.
  - a non-boot HID interface is taken to be an absolute pointer and is
    not asked for boot protocol, which it does not have -- that request
    failing is what stopped it binding.
  - tablet_report decodes the fixed 6-byte layout (buttons, 16-bit X,
    16-bit Y, wheel) and scales the logical range to pixels there,
    because it is the only place that knows the range.
  - input_mouse_abs reports EV_ABS/ABS_X/ABS_Y so a reader can tell an
    absolute position from a delta, and mouse_set_abs places the pointer
    rather than nudging it.
  - Schcom treats EV_ABS as authoritative and EV_REL as a nudge.

The device binds and identifies correctly: "usb-hid: tablet (absolute) on
slot 1, endpoint 0x81 every 4 ms".

It is NOT finished, and QEMU_INPUT is empty by default because of it. No
reports have yet been observed arriving on the tablet's interrupt
endpoint, so making it the default pointer would trade a cursor that
drifts for one that does not move at all. Opt in with

  make qemu QEMU_INPUT='-device qemu-xhci,id=xhci -device usb-tablet,bus=xhci.0'

Next step is to find out why nothing arrives: whether the first transfer
is queued but never completes, whether a completion needs re-arming for
this endpoint, or whether QEMU is not routing motion to the tablet at all
(`info mice`).

bootcheck 108 [ok], schcom-test passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 18:27:01 +02:00
Nexoniarz
eafdddefbc mouse: clamp the pointer to the screen that exists, not to 800x600
kernel/dev/mouse.c held the pointer inside literal 800x600 bounds. That
was correct while 800x600 was the only mode the loader could set, which
it was until the resolution became a boot-time choice. At 1280x800 the
pointer simply stopped two thirds of the way across and would not go
further -- which reads as the cursor drifting away from the host's rather
than as a clamp.

vga.c grows vga_get_width/vga_get_height for it. The mode is chosen at
boot now, so nothing above the framebuffer may hardcode its size, and
these are the first two callers that needed to ask.

Verified that the system still builds and boots at 1280x800, and that
bootcheck is 108 [ok] and schcom-test passes. I did not manage to
photograph the pointer past the old limit in the time available -- there
is no reader for /dev/mouse in the image and the screendump attempt did
not resolve, so the fix rests on inspection rather than on a picture.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 05:46:12 +02:00