Commit graph SchOS/docs/architecture
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nexoniarz
953f9c5c3c branding: one mark, and PSOGM draws it
Guru and SchCotie are gone. Shift is the only mark, and the crash screen draws
it where the face used to be.

Guru was an icon -- a pictogram with a face, denoting one state -- that lived
on the crash screen and nowhere else. Its argument was 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. That part holds, and it is kept in the branding README because it
is the argument against any second mark. What does not follow is that the
answer is a *new* mark. Shift already signs the system, it is already what the
machine drew on the splash it started with, and a reader who has seen it twice
before the crash recognises it faster than a face they have never seen.

SchCotie was a mascot, and never existed: the file said so itself under "what
this does not cover". A brief for a character nobody is about to draw is not
worth carrying.

So `draw_guru()` and its SVG-space geometry leave panic.c, the two `guru.svg`
files are deleted, and PSOGM calls gfx_draw_logo() -- the same include/logo.h
mask the loader splash and the boot console composite. At its native 128 px:
there is no resampler in the crash path, and the face was scalable in a place
that only ever drew it at one size.

The name stays. "Purple Screen of Guru Meditation" is the Amiga nod, which
panic.c's own header already called out as a separate thing from the mark.

**And taking the screenshot to check it caught a regression from the TTF
console work.** `gfx_draw_char()` -- the pixel-positioned path, which only
PSOGM uses -- still walked `font_data[c][row]` for `row < CHAR_HEIGHT`.
font_data has exactly 16 rows per glyph; CHAR_HEIGHT is the *TrueType* cell
height now, about 21. So every line of the crash report drew five rows of the
next character's bitmap underneath itself, and it looked like each line had
been printed twice. The grid path had been updated when the cell size stopped
being a constant; this one had not, because nothing routine draws text in pixel
coordinates. Both go through one draw_glyph_px() now, and the bitmap's own
geometry is spelled BITMAP_W/BITMAP_H so it cannot be mistaken for a cell size
again.

Two stale claims corrected while in there, in panic.c's header and in
graphics.md: PSOGM has not dimmed-and-floated over the old screen for a while
-- it clears to full purple, and the file's own code comment says why -- and
there is no longer "a face that is obviously a cartoon".

The website's crash section shows the mark in flat white rather than its own
violets, which is what the kernel actually draws: PSOGM composites a coverage
mask in one colour, and those violets sit close enough to #4B1D9A to
half-disappear against it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-21 21:35:58 +02:00
Nexoniarz
370605452c rename: it was writing v1 dirents into a B-tree, and nobody noticed
`rename()` refused an existing destination, so write-to-a-temporary-then-rename
-- how every careful program saves a file -- failed on the second save of
anything. zsh's history was the visible case: `.zsh_history.new` accumulated
for ever and the history itself never updated.

An earlier attempt to fix this was reverted after it lost both files, and the
note it left behind blamed HTree slot reuse. That was the wrong suspect.

**sys_rename was removing the old name by hand.** memset a `struct dirent` to
zero and writei() it into the parent directory at the offset dirlookup()
returned. That is the v1 filesystem's on-disk layout, written directly,
bypassing dp->ops entirely. On SchFS a directory is a B-tree with an index over
it -- "the record at that offset" is not a thing, and writing zeroes there
corrupted the directory while leaving the name in the index. Adding a second
removal on top of a corrupting one is how both files disappeared.

Every other caller in the file already used dirunlink(). This one had been
open-coding a filesystem it no longer ran on, and the bug stayed invisible for
as long as nothing asked it to remove two names instead of one.

With that corrected, replacing the destination is the straightforward thing it
should always have been: look it up, refuse if it is a directory, unlink it,
drop its nlink. rename(a, a) returns 0 and touches nothing, per POSIX -- both
names already reach the same file, and removing one to add it back is only
equivalent when nothing else is watching.

The lock discipline is inherited rather than invented, and it is the delicate
part: dp_old and dp_new are frequently the *same* directory reached through two
nameiparent() calls, which is two references to one inode. So no two directory
locks are held at once -- each is locked, used, unlocked before the next -- and
the source inode stays unlocked throughout, held alive by an nlink bump.

Directories are still refused, in both roles: moving one needs the `..` fixup
and the ancestor-loop check that are not written, and replacing one needs them
plus an emptiness test. EISDIR either way.

    mv a c        ->  0, c has a's contents
    mv c b        ->  0, b replaced, b has a's contents   (this is the fix)
    mv b b        ->  0, nothing happens
    mv nope z     ->  ENOENT
    mv b d/       ->  0, b lands inside d

60 create-and-rename cycles leave one file and 4 KB of disk, not 60. /root
holds .zsh_history and no .zsh_history.new, and a marker written in one boot is
still in the history file on the next.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-20 01:33:15 +02:00
Nexoniarz
4e3e345b41 kbd: three layouts, and the arrow keys were sitting on top of UTF-8
`∞`, `→`, `≤` and `'` could not be typed. `ą` and `ę` could. That pairing is
the whole diagnosis: KBD_UP was 0xE2 and its neighbours filled 0xE0..0xE9,
which are exactly the UTF-8 lead bytes for three-byte characters. Every
character in U+0800..U+FFFF -- most punctuation, every arrow, every maths
symbol, the whole of CJK -- arrived as a value the console read as an arrow key
and helpfully turned into `ESC [ A`. Two-byte sequences lead with 0xC4 and
nothing claimed 0xC4, so Polish came through and the rest did not.

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

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

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

Two things deliberately are *not* tables:

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

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

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

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

And two symlink bugs found while chasing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-20 00:35:34 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ca28978995 dma: the 4 MB cap was the refusal, not the arena
vgpud: wanted 7365 KB of DMA memory for a 1920x982 framebuffer
    vgpud: not enough contiguous DMA memory
    schinitd: restarting os.schos.vgpud        (and again, and again, until
    schinit: supervisor stopped answering       schinit replaced schinitd)

Every number in that diagnostic was about the arena, and the arena had 61 MB
free. The refusal came from do_dma()'s per-request cap, which was 4 MB --
exactly one framebuffer at 1280x800, chosen when that was the only thing
anybody asked for.

virtio-gpu's display size is the size of the **host's window**. Drag it out and
the guest is asked for 1920x982x4 in one contiguous piece, and no amount of
free arena helps. 32 MB now, which is 2560x1600 with room over. The cap is not
there to ration memory -- the arena does that and says so properly -- it is
there so a wild size cannot ask for everything by accident.

DMA_ARENA_BYTES 16 -> 64 MB alongside, for the reason its own comment already
gave and then got the arithmetic wrong on: either side of the handover *both*
drivers hold a framebuffer, so the requirement is two at the largest mode, not
one. 16 MB is two at 1280x800 and nothing bigger. Verified booting at 256M and
512M as well as 1G.

And vgpud no longer dies when it cannot have what it asked for. It claims the
framebuffer before creating the resource, and if the full size cannot be had it
steps down by thirds to 640x480 before giving up -- and gives up with
SCHINIT_EXIT_NORESTART rather than die(), because a driver that will fail
identically on every restart should not be restarted. That loop is what made
schinit replace the supervisor mid-boot.

    vgpud: the display is 1920x1080 but only 1280x720 of DMA could be had

is what it says when it steps down. With the cap raised it does not need to:
1920x1080 now allocates its full 8100 KB, 0 restarts.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 22:52:20 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ff7afa746e tty: arrow keys, backspace, and four terminals nobody was home on
Three things, all in the first minute of using a shell.

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

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

    echo alpha  \b\b  zha  \b\b

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 22:12:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
eacb13ce35 dma: best fit, and say which number is the problem
The arena hands out contiguous memory -- that is the only reason it exists --
so the number that matters is not how much is free but how big the largest
piece is. First fit spends that number cheaply: a 64 KB ring taken from the
middle of a 16 MB arena leaves two 8 MB extents, and a framebuffer wanting 9 MB
then cannot be had on an arena three quarters empty.

dma_alloc() is best fit now: the tightest extent that holds the request, which
leaves the large ones whole for the requests that have no alternative. O(n)
over a table with a handful of entries, and it cannot fragment worse than first
fit for any request.

And the failure says both numbers, because they point at different fixes and
the old message only had one of them:

    dma_alloc: no room for 9216000 bytes -- 12591104 free,
               largest contiguous piece 8495104 (`schdbg dma` for the map)

"12 MB free" alone reads as out-of-memory on a machine that has plenty; the gap
between the two is the whole story. A fragmented arena is cured by whoever is
holding the block in the middle letting go, a full one by DMA_ARENA_BYTES.

Also fixes a real bug found while reading it: when the extent table was full,
the tail-split path did `continue` while still holding the lock and having
already committed the extent to the caller -- so it carried on scanning, and
could return a second block or fall through to the failure path having handed
one out. It now returns the block it committed, and says so.

**This does not close the report it came from.** vgpud failing to get a
framebuffer was not reproduced here: at 1280x800 the arena has 8.1 MB
contiguous against a 4 MB request. What is fixed is that the next occurrence
explains itself instead of saying "not enough DMA memory" on an empty arena.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 21:28:07 +02:00
Nexoniarz
617a4aec0a boot: one line when it works, all of it when it does not
A boot printed about thirty lines before reaching a prompt. Every one was
useful once, and printed on every boot for ever they train the person in front
of the machine to stop reading their own console -- which is expensive on the
day one of them changes.

    SchOS UEFI loader
    Press F8 for boot options... booting

    Welcome to SchOS!  (F8 at boot for the full log, or dmesg once you are in)

    root@schos / »

**Nothing was deleted, it was routed.** consputc() already wrote to the klog
ring before anywhere else, so a line can be kept in full while being held back
from the two places a person looks. kinfo() is cprintf() with that routing, and
`dmesg` still has the whole boot with timestamps afterwards. The rule for which
is which is not how interesting a line is -- everything was interesting to
somebody once -- but whether you would want to see it on a machine that is
*working*. `pci: 7 devices` is yes the first time and no every time after;
`e1000: no DMA memory for the rings` is yes for ever and stays a cprintf.

The verbose boot the F8 menu already offered now means something much bigger,
which is the other half of this: it is the only way to see any of it live.

Userspace follows through /proc/bootmode, one word. schinit, schinitd and vgpud
hold back their progress lines and never their failures -- a supervisor that
goes quiet when a job dies is worse than one that chatters.

Two things found by testing rather than by reading:

  - schinit read /proc/bootmode *before* bootstrap() mounted /proc, so it got
    "quiet" every time and the verbose boot was quiet in the one process that
    runs first. It reads after the mount now.
  - resolvconf announced "already exists; -f to replace it" on every boot after
    the first, which is a line about having done nothing. It is quiet when the
    file already says what it would have written, and speaks only when the two
    disagree -- which means the nameserver changed and the machine is using the
    old one.

Verified both ways: quiet boot is six lines, a forced-verbose build prints all
thirty plus the `verbose boot:` steps, and /proc/kmsg holds every line in both.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 21:19:50 +02:00
Nexoniarz
6db9cc1230 net: closing a listening socket panicked the kernel
Ctrl-C on httpd took the whole machine down:

    lwip assert: invalid socket state for recv callback at tcp.c:2024
      #1 tcp_recv  #2 inet_close  #3 sockclose  #4 fileclose  #5 exit

tcp_listen() does not put a pcb into a listening state -- it frees the
connection pcb and returns a *different, smaller* structure, a
tcp_pcb_listen, which has no recv, sent, err or poll field at all. The two
are different types behind one `struct tcp_pcb *`, and the only callback a
listening one has is accept.

inet_close() cleared the callbacks identically for both, so on a listening
socket tcp_recv() wrote past the end of the allocation. lwIP asserts rather
than allowing that, and an assert here is a panic -- which means any program
that listened and then exited killed the kernel, because the close path runs
from exit(). A user process, ending normally, halting the system.

Nothing had ever done it: until cmd/httpd nothing in the tree listened on TCP
and exited. schdbgd would have found it a few days later.

inet_close() now branches on is->listening -- which was already there, one
field away, and the close path simply never asked. The listening case clears
accept and calls tcp_close (always ERR_OK for a LISTEN pcb, and tcp_abort
would be wrong on one: it reaches for connection state that does not exist).
The connected case also clears `sent`, which it had been leaving set.

Verified: Ctrl-C the listener, no panic, and a second httpd binds port 80
again -- which is the part that proves the pcb was actually freed. Six
requests after the change, all 200.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 19:53:53 +02:00
Nexoniarz
b08432b2c3 userland: 268 applets, an editor, names that resolve, and a web server
Four complaints, and only one of them was the thing it looked like.

**"toybox is too small."** Half true, and the fix cost no licensing at all:
236 of toybox's applets are what defconfig builds, and the rest live in
toys/pending/ -- awk, bc, diff, more, expr, tr, hexdump, stty among them. Same
0BSD tarball, switched off by a config default. 26 of them are on now, 236 ->
268. Not everything: strace wants ptrace, syslogd wants BSD's facilitynames[],
git wants OpenSSL, and those three break the link.

The toybox build also works again on this machine. Its scripts start
#!/bin/bash, which does not exist on NixOS, so the binary in the tree was one
nobody could reproduce; the shebangs are rewritten to /usr/bin/env bash on the
way in. Pending applets are enabled by editing .config directly, because
`make oldconfig` is the obvious way and undoes it -- every pending symbol is
`default n`.

**BusyBox was asked for and is not here.** It is GPL-2.0-only, and `make
ramroot` links the root image *into the kernel binary*, so it would put GPLv2
inside an Apache-2.0 executable -- which is the exact case ports/Makefile's
NOTPORTS filter and docs/licensing.md §4 exist for. nano is the same answer one
version later. Both recorded in licensing.md with what was done instead, since
"no" without an alternative is how a rule gets quietly broken later.

**An editor that is not vi.** kilo, BSD-2-Clause, one 1300-line file, no
dependencies beyond termios and TIOCGWINSZ, both of which zsh already needed.
Installed as /bin/edit as well as /bin/kilo, because somebody with a file to
fix will type `edit`.

**"wget doesn't work."** Not a userland problem, and BusyBox's wget would have
failed identically: nothing on this system could turn a name into an address,
so every program taking a hostname failed in its own way and each looked like
a separate bug. There is still no DNS client in SchOS and there does not need
to be -- musl has a complete resolver and it works over ordinary UDP sockets.
The one missing fact was which nameserver, which the kernel has had all along
from DHCP and never published. /proc/resolv.conf publishes it in resolv.conf's
exact syntax; cmd/resolvconf decides whether it becomes /etc/resolv.conf, and
will not overwrite a hand-written one without -f.

  # wget -O - http://example.com/ | head -1
  <!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Example Domain</title>

**Something to host with.** cmd/httpd: GET and HEAD, static files, index.html
for a directory and a listing otherwise, a child per connection. No CGI, no
keep-alive, no TLS, no config file. The path check is the only
security-relevant code in it and it refuses rather than normalises -- no
component may be `..`, and percent-decoding happens first, because %2e%2e is
`..` and a check before decoding does not see it. Both forms answer 403.

And the disk is 100 MB, from 32. It is sparse, so the image is 21 MB on the
host. RAMDISK_BLOCKS went 6000 -> 8000 with it: the ramdisk was at 86% and the
next thing added would have broken `make ramroot`, which nobody would have
noticed until they used it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 19:24:55 +02:00
Nexoniarz
bc39b73969 debugger: D5, the network transport -- and the plan closes
schdbgd bridges TCP to the debugger, which is the one way in that does not
need you to be sitting at the machine. It is a bridge and nothing else: a line
in becomes a line written to /dev/dbgro and the answer comes back, so `nc` is a
complete client and there is no clever client to be broken on the day you need
this.

    # schdbgd &
    schdbgd: debugger on port 4444, loopback only
    $ nc 127.0.0.1 4444
    dma
    arena  0xffff80003da41000-0xffff80003ea41000  16384 KB total, ...

A kernel debugger plus a TCP socket is a remote root hole, so three things were
decided rather than discovered:

  - It does not start by itself. schdbgd.job ships Disabled. SchOS has no
    kernel command line, so the boot flag the plan asked for is the job
    manifest, which is the same thing in this system's own idiom.
  - It binds loopback; -a names an address and says so in a paragraph.
  - It cannot reach a view that changes state, enforced in the kernel.

That last one is /dev/dbgro: /dev/dbg on minor 1. The minor is the one piece of
per-open state a character device already sees, so which node you opened is the
permission -- nothing to latch, nothing to remember between the write and the
read, no way across. Which views are refused comes from dbg_register_rw() on
the registration itself, because a central list of dangerous views goes stale
in the direction where a new view is quietly treated as safe. Today that is
`watch <addr>`; `watch` with no argument is still the listing and still
answered.

Also: socket() now accepts IPPROTO_TCP with SOCK_STREAM and IPPROTO_UDP with
SOCK_DGRAM. They name the default rather than departing from it, and toybox's
nc writes them out -- so TCP was "Protocol not supported" on a system whose
whole network is TCP.

docs/plan/debugger.md retires into docs/architecture/debugging.md; 16 files
repointed. Every plan in docs/plan/ that was open is now closed, so the next
thing is Gate 0 itself: the survey, with the instrument built.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 15:33:53 +02:00
Nexoniarz
071499a378 ldls: a second driver, and everything it found
e1000 -- Linux's, unmodified -- probes, opens, gets an address by DHCP and
carries ping traffic in a SchOS process. The kernel was driving that NIC and
gave it up, which makes it the first real handover as well as the second
driver.

None of what it needed was a missing feature. Every one was a call that
succeeded, returned zero and did nothing:

  _find_next_bit          "bit 0 is set"          -- for_each_cpu never ended
  netif_carrier_off       carrier already up      -- TCTL.EN never set
  __x86_indirect_thunk_r8 the jump discarded      -- 255 rx buffers, none made
  dma_map_page_attrs      bus address 0           -- NIC aimed at physical 0

so the rule from memcpy is now general: a stub returning zero is unsafe
wherever zero is a meaningful answer.

The loader grew ko_fixup_percpu(). The stack guard turned out to be one
per-CPU variable among several; `current` cannot be defused because the driver
dereferences it. Taking the %gs off instead leaves the same opcode reading the
same width from storage the host supplies -- a per-CPU variable in a
single-threaded host is just a variable. Eight bytes become seven and a nop,
and the displacement is not always last, so there is now just enough of an x86
decoder in ko.c to know how long the instruction is.

ldls/kpi/thunk.c is fifteen lines of assembly and the highest-value file here:
retpolines are control flow, and a stub cannot stand in for a jump.

The kernel side:

  - ioperm.c, the TSS I/O permission bitmap. A driver's outl is an instruction,
    not a call, and e1000's reset path picks it deliberately. IOPL=3 would hand
    over the PIC and the disk with it, so it is per-port. Writing it found that
    the I/O map base had been written at offset 64 rather than 102, leaving the
    CPU checking ports 0-831 against the TSS's own RSP0.
  - claim masks the device's IRQ line: 450,000 a second, otherwise.
  - net_detach(), the missing half of net_attach_late(). An interface left in
    the stack keeps its route and sends every frame to a driver that refuses
    it, which looks exactly like a userspace driver that does not work.
  - e1000_release() gives up the interface, not just the hardware.

8139too still passes 4/4; ldls-check still passes 27; four CPUs, no panic.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 15:20:07 +02:00
Nexoniarz
f38eb8a7fd ldls: L4 was free after all, and the plan closes
L4 was listed as "free -- H2 built all of this" and never actually tested,
which is a claim rather than a result. Tested now, and it holds:

    ldlsd running     ping 2/2; holds index 7 and DMA slots 3 and 4
    killed            interface DOWN, device released, bus mastering
                      cleared, DMA reclaimed -- back to vgpud's 3 blocks
    ping              fails honestly: sendto: -5
    a second ldlsd    ping 3/3, and the arena hands back the same addresses

pciuser_release_all() and netuser_release_all() sit beside each other in
exit() for the same reason, and that they apply unchanged to a foreign driver
is the whole point of having built them against our own.

With that, every milestone on ldls.md is done, so it leaves docs/plan/ for
docs/architecture/ -- the rule docs/plan/README.md states and the one that
keeps the two directories meaning different things. The new document describes
what is, not what was planned: the five rules, the four pieces, what it costs
(polling, no stack protector, locks that are no-ops), that it can be killed,
and a "what it does not do" that leads with one driver, one kernel version,
tried once.

Sixteen source files pointed at docs/plan/ldls.md and would have been dangling
the moment it moved. All repointed, and the milestone references -- which the
architecture doc deliberately does not have -- rewritten to name sections
instead, so a reader lands somewhere real.

The register row closes with it. hybrid.md freed a slot, ldls.md took it, and
it is now free again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 13:37:04 +02:00
Nexoniarz
42f98130c4 ldls: a Linux driver, driving real hardware
docs/plan/ldls.md milestone L3c. ldls/kpi/ implements 41 of 8139too's 94
symbols rather than logging them: register access to a mapped BAR, the PCI
calls to /dev/pci, allocation to mmap and PCIIOC_DMA, register_netdev to
/dev/netdev.

    # ldlsd /lib/modules/8139too.ko /lib/modules/btf
      found   10ec:8139 at 00:05.0
      bar 1    0x0000000081060000  256 mem
      calling probe, with 41 of 94 symbols implemented
      kpi: mapped BAR 1 -- phys 0x0000000081060000, 256 bytes
      kpi: the driver read a MAC off the hardware: 52:54:00🆎cd:ef
      netuser: ldls0 is a process now, 52:54:0🆎cd:ef
      probe returned 0 after 0 stub call(s)

52:54:00🆎cd:ef is what the machine was configured with. Nothing invented
it: the driver bit-banged the card's EEPROM, serially, through a BAR mapped by
/dev/pci, and handed back what it found. That it matches means the loader, the
relocations, the BTF offsets, the BAR mapping and the register accessors are
all correct at once, which is why it was the thing to aim at. Zero stub calls:
every symbol probe reaches is implemented.

Two bugs, one of them the kernel's.

Mine first: pci_iomap checked a failed mmap for -1 only, while SchOS returns
-errno. It returned -13 as a pointer, the driver took that as its register
base, and the first write landed at 0x4e -- thirteen below where it meant to
be.

Underneath it, the real one. sys_mmap rounds a length up to a page, the only
granularity an MMU has, and pciuser_mmio_ok() compared that against the BAR's
own size. rtl8139's registers are 256 bytes, the request became 4096, and the
answer was -EACCES for a device the process legitimately held. A BAR smaller
than a page could never be mapped at all, and nothing had noticed because the
only consumer until now was virtio-gpu, whose BARs are large. The check is now
against the pages the BAR lies in, and the widening is named where it happens:
a sub-page BAR hands over the whole page, forced by the hardware rather than
chosen.

That is exactly what hybrid.md said a foreign driver would be good for --
"what it asks for is what a foreign driver would ask for too" -- arriving as a
concrete bug rather than a prediction.

kpi_io_ok() now bounds every ioread/iowrite against the mapping pci_iomap
returned. A stray access would otherwise be a page fault with no context, and
with no IOMMU a hosted driver's wild writes have to be caught early or not at
all. It is also what turned the fault above into two lines naming the offsets.

Not done, and said so in the output rather than only in the doc: no frame has
moved. ndo_open is never called and there is no transmit or receive path, so
ldlsd releases the interface instead of leaving it up -- a link that reports
itself up with nothing draining its queue is a black hole, and the stack would
send DHCP into it for ever. Down is the true answer until packets move. That
is L3d, now listed separately.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 09:59:14 +02:00
Nexoniarz
ef3e191c6f hybrid: a modeset, from a process
H3 of docs/plan/hybrid.md -- "a modeset API, which is the thing an
out-of-kernel GPU driver makes affordable and an in-kernel one never got".

    # schmode modes
    1280x800  *
    1280x720
    1024x768
    800x600
    640x480
    # schmode 1024 768
    1024x768 ok

Captured off the virtio-gpu head, the frames really come back 1280x800,
1024x768, 640x480 and 1280x800 again, with the checkerboard band showing no
shear at any of them.

Nothing in the kernel changed for this. No syscall on the path has heard of
a scanout: schmode writes a line to a socket and vgpud sends five commands
to the device. The comparison is the point -- the same five commands in the
kernel would have been the same five commands *and a reason to be nervous*,
because a wrong one there takes the machine instead of one process. That is
why the in-kernel driver never grew one: not difficulty, exposure.

The framebuffer is allocated once, at the largest mode, and every smaller
mode reuses it. PCIIOC_DMA has no free -- a driver's blocks come back when
it exits and not before -- so a modeset that allocated would spend sixteen
slots and then the arena, and the failure would look like a GPU bug rather
than like counting. A larger mode is refused and says why.

vgpud used to end in for(;;) sleep(100) under a comment arguing that
building a control socket before there is a compositor to judge it is the
mistake this plan warns about. That was right about a *compositor protocol*
and wrong as a reason to have no socket: a modeset has a consumer that
exists, somebody changing the mode and looking at the screen, and schmode
is small enough to judge an interface this small. What is deliberately not
on that socket is everything a compositor would need -- no buffer
submission, no damage, no vblank -- which still waits, for the original
reason.

H4, the USB eviction, is now the only milestone left on the plan and is by
some distance the largest thing on the register.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 01:36:05 +02:00
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
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
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
7c8cf51941 schfs: records at arbitrary offsets are packed, and the compiler is told
A leaf's value area holds variable-length records end to end, so a record begins
wherever the one before it finished -- a multiple of 8 only by luck. The code
reads them by casting a pointer into the block, which tells the compiler they
are aligned when they are not.

That works on x86, which is why it has never shown as a bug, and it is undefined
in C. A compiler entitled to assume 8-byte alignment may emit an instruction
that requires it, and the failure would arrive at a different optimisation level
or on a different architecture looking like filesystem corruption rather than
like codegen. UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer reported 31 of them across obj.c,
objw.c, attr.c and space.c.

Seven types now carry SCHFS_PACKED: dirent_rec, extent, extref, index_rec,
attr_rec, snap and inode. Two of those -- attr_rec and inode -- were never
reported, because schfs_objtest does not reach an unaligned instance of either.
They were latent rather than absent, and casting into a leaf is the same lie
whether or not a test has caught it yet.

NO ON-DISK LAYOUT CHANGED, and that was measured before the annotation was
applied rather than assumed: every one of these already carries explicit `pad`
fields and therefore has no implicit padding, so sizes and member offsets are
identical with and without it. Seven _Static_asserts now pin the sizes, because
a record that silently grows misreads every existing volume from that point on
and looks like corruption rather than like a struct that changed.

schfs_node_hdr, schfs_item, schfs_kptr and schfs_uberblock are deliberately left
alone. The node header is exactly 32 bytes, so the items and key pointers after
it are already 8-aligned, and annotating them would cost byte-wise access on the
tree's hottest paths to fix a problem they do not have.

Verified by reading an image written before the change: schfs_fsck --check
passes on structure, checksums, key ordering, data blocks and derived free
space, and the kernel mounts its own root unchanged.

Also here: mkschfs passed a null pointer to qsort for an empty directory. Every
implementation ignores it when the count is zero; the standard does not say they
have to.

make schfs-check now runs with no sanitizer output at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:56:36 +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
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
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
08a1a9033a boot: separate BIOS from UEFI
boot/bios/ now holds the MBR, the El Torito stub and the real-mode stage
2; boot/uefi/ is empty and documented.

Separate directories rather than #ifdefs, because the two share almost
nothing. A BIOS loader lives in 16-bit real mode, reaches the firmware
through software interrupts, and walks itself up into long mode. A UEFI
loader is a 64-bit PE that the firmware has already placed in long mode
with paging on, calling services through a table of function pointers.
What they do share is the hand-off contract, which boot/README.md now
writes down: ELF segments placed, long mode, a 24-byte-entry memory map
at E820_MAP_ADDR, framebuffer geometry at VBE_INFO_ADDR.

That contract is the point of documenting it now. UEFI's GetMemoryMap
returns EFI_MEMORY_DESCRIPTORs, and the right move is to translate them
into the entries kernel/arch/x86_64/e820.c already parses rather than
teach the kernel a second format.

Build output paths under $(BUILD)/boot are unchanged; only sources moved.
2026-08-09 16:00:03 +02:00
Nexoniarz
754d96ebc5 tools: group scripts by what runs them
tools/windows/   .ps1   (pwsh, so usable from Linux and macOS too)
  tools/posix/     .sh
  tools/python/    .py
  tools/           .c and .pl

The .c and .pl files stay at the top level because they are not
host-specific: the build compiles or invokes them on every platform.

Call sites updated in the Makefile, ports/mk/port.mk, docs and the
project memory. The one thing that does not survive a move on its own is
a script deriving the repo root from its own location -- all nine
PowerShell tools used Split-Path $PSScriptRoot -Parent, and memory-sync.sh
used dirname/.., both of which quietly become tools/ one level deeper.
Two levels now.

Two pre-existing Windows failures surfaced while verifying, both real and
neither caused by the move:

  - schfs_fsck.c did not compile under mingw at all: --extract uses
    POSIX mkdir(path,mode), symlink() and link(), none of which mingw
    has. That took the whole tool with it, and `make schfs-check` with
    it. mkdir maps to _mkdir; symlink and link fail loudly rather than
    writing a regular file in their place, because an extracted tree
    that differs from the image while reporting success defeats the
    point of --extract.
  - the round-trip test then failed at `ln -s`, since Git Bash cannot
    create symlinks without developer mode. It skips with a message now.
    Not a fudge: mkschfs's mingw build cannot see a symlink either, so
    the test would have compared a tree with none against an image with
    none and called it a pass -- coverage reporting itself as present
    while being absent.

Verified on Windows: build clean, all seven bootcheck suites green,
make schfs-check passes.
2026-08-09 14:38:02 +02:00
Nexoniarz
e04ca28812 Rename Schunix to SchOS; the kernel becomes SchIFT
Removes the "-unix" element and with it any trademark exposure to The
Open Group.

The split follows the ecosystem layout: SchOS is the system, and the
kernel has its own name. Kernel-identity strings are the only places
that take SchIFT -- uname(2) sysname, /proc/version, and the two licence
sentences that say "kernel" outright. That is what every Unix does here:
`uname -s` on Linux reports the kernel, not the distribution. Everything
a user reads as the product -- panic screen, boot menu, error prefixes,
docs, LICENSE, NOTICE -- is SchOS.

schunix.img is schos.img, the logo assets and the musl TLS patch are
renamed, and __SCHUNIX__ is __SCHOS__ (the define and the patch that
consumes it moved together).

Two things the rename broke, both found by the bootcheck suite:

  - shmtest wrote "SCHUNIX-MMAP-OK" with a hardcoded length of 15 and
    compared it back by hand-counted offsets (m[3]=='U', m[14]=='K').
    The shorter marker left the write running two bytes past the literal
    and the compare reading past the data, failing a file-backed mmap
    that was working correctly. Now written and compared through one
    constant with sizeof.
  - bootcheck asserted a 31-byte file after appending to
    "hello-from-schunix"; the shorter string makes it 29.

Both are the same mistake: a string literal whose length is written out
somewhere else. Full suite green -- base, Tty, Ps, Sock, Fb, Usb, Evdev.
2026-08-09 14:09:59 +02:00
Nexoniarz
d0f7acf9eb Initial commit: Schunix as it stands before the SchOS rename
An x86-64 operating system built from xv6, now largely rewritten: SMP,
a copy-on-write root filesystem (SchFS), PCI/USB/virtio drivers, a TTF
rasteriser, and a Linux-numbered syscall ABI.

No history before this point -- the tree was never under version control.
This commit exists so the rename that follows has something to undo to.
2026-08-09 13:47:01 +02:00