The firmware's AML is now interpreted. uACPI 6.1.1 (MIT) is fetched by
ports/uacpi, checksum-verified, and compiled into the kernel unmodified,
the same way lwIP is. kernel/acpi/host.c is its host layer: memory,
mapping, port and PCI config I/O, time, mutexes and events that spin
before the scheduler exists, the SCI, and an "acpi" thread for the
work the SCI defers.
PCI interrupts go where the board says. pci_init() now routes every
device's INTx through the root bridge's _PRT before drivers bind. It
follows link devices' _CRS, uses a bridge's own _PRT where the namespace
has one, and swizzles through bridges that don't. Before this, INTx
waited on the 8259's line number, which is the wrong pin in APIC mode.
irq_register() takes a trigger mode rather than a level/low flag,
because q35's links and most SCIs are level, active-high. The MADT's
interrupt source overrides are now parsed, and are what places the SCI.
The power button syncs the filesystems and powers off. shutdown() and
reboot() go through the firmware's S5 and reset register first, and
only then fall back to the emulators' ports, which a real board does
not answer.
Tested under QEMU: q35 with MSI off routes xHCI to GSI 22,
level/active-high, and it takes real interrupts with nothing polled.
system_powerdown powers off q35 and i440fx (QEMU exits 0), and q35
with 4 CPUs boots from NVMe with USB hot-plug working alongside.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
PCI drivers took their interrupt from INTERRUPT_LINE. On real hardware
that is the 8259's number, not the IOAPIC pin the device is wired to
(that is in ACPI _PRT, which needs AML), so nothing ever arrived. xHCI
is entirely interrupt-driven, so the USB keyboard and a USB root would
have hung even on a clean boot. Under QEMU the two numbers agree,
which is why it never showed.
- pci_irq_attach()/pci_irq_detach(): MSI, then MSI-X if the driver
allows it, then INTx. The handler is registered before MSI is
enabled, so no edge is lost. xHCI, e1000, r8169 and rtl8139 use it.
- Lines 24-29 are MSI vectors. The LAPIC error vector moves from 19,
which is a PCI pin on Intel chipsets, to 30. Nothing is placed at or
above vector 64 (T_SYSCALL).
- A storming line is masked and its handlers are polled instead of
being left to eat the CPU. A level line that has had a handler for 2 s
and never fired is polled every tick by a kernel thread.
Tested in QEMU q35 with the root on a USB stick: xHCI and e1000e on
MSI; then MSI disabled and INTx deliberately misrouted, where xHCI got
zero interrupts and the root still mounted through the poller. i440fx
INTx and the rtl8139 hand-over are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HH7xukt4aaiGj1nQEAoQf1
docs/plan/hybrid.md mechanism 3. A process asks for a device's interrupts with
PCIIOC_IRQ and then reads them, which is how Linux's uio does it and for the
same reason: a descriptor composes with poll, and a driver that stops reading
falls behind rather than losing events. read() returns a count rather than a
flag, so a driver that was busy sees it missed three and acts once.
Proven against an e1000e by asserting a cause through its ICS register and
reading the interrupt back out in userspace:
interrupts routed here (line 10)
interrupt delivered, count = 1
ICR = 0x80000004
0x80000004 is the cause the test set plus INT_ASSERTED -- the device's own
register, read by userspace as its acknowledgement.
**The masking is the design, not a detail.** A PCI line is level-triggered and
stays asserted until the cause is cleared at the device, which is a different
register on every chip and so is something only the driver can do. The kernel
masks the line on arrival and userspace's write() unmasks it. Signalling EOI on
a still-asserted line re-enters the handler immediately and for ever; this
kernel did exactly that by accident at 72,000 interrupts a second, and what it
looked like from outside was a clock running seven times slow (§13).
Which decides what happens when a driver dies mid-interrupt: the line is left
**masked**. The instinct is to unmask -- do not leave the device dead -- and it
is wrong, because unmasking an asserted line with no handler is a crashed
driver taking the machine down with it. Masked is safe and not permanent: the
next PCIIOC_IRQ arms it. Both halves verified by crashing a driver on purpose
and then starting another one.
A line already carrying kernel handlers is refused outright. Masking is
per-line, so handing out a shared one would silence whichever kernel driver is
also there, with nothing logged. MSI is the real answer and pci_msi_enable() is
already in the tree waiting for a caller.
Also fixed, found by running the crash twice: DMA buffers were never returned
when a process exited. The arena is 4 MB and contiguous, so a driver that
restarts a few times exhausted it -- "out of DMA memory, 3584 free" -- which is
a poor property for an interface whose whole promise is that a driver can crash
and come back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
A timer interrupt that arrives while interrupts are disabled is not delayed,
it is lost -- the LAPIC in periodic mode holds one pending interrupt and drops
the rest. So anything the kernel does with interrupts off for longer than
10 ms makes `ticks` run slow, and it never catches up.
That has now presented twice as "uptime is wrong": once as an interrupt storm
taking 83% of the CPU, once as heavy console output on a display that is
expensive to draw to. Both times the tick was the messenger, and both times it
looked like a timekeeping bug.
monotonic() reads the TSC instead. It is a counter in the silicon that
advances whether or not this kernel is paying attention, it is already
measured against the PIT at boot, and reading it is one instruction and no
lock. wallclock(), /proc/uptime, sysinfo, getrusage and times() all go through
it now.
`ticks` keeps the job it is good at -- the scheduler preempts on it, sleep()
counts it -- where losing one means a slightly longer sleep rather than a
wrong answer about what time it is.
Lost ticks are no longer harmful, which makes them invisible, which is worse.
So /proc/interrupts now says
timer: 3383 ticks taken, 3387 expected
and names the gap when it grows, because a machine dropping timer interrupts
is spending too long with interrupts disabled, and that is worth knowing
before it turns into a clock that lies.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
fastfetch reported 3 seconds of uptime after 15 real ones, `time` claimed
3.12s for a 20-second command, and ping's one-second interval was closer to
six. One cause, not three: `ticks` was advancing at ~14.5 Hz instead of 100.
It was not the timer. virtio-gpu-pci shares IRQ 11 with the e1000 and
registered no interrupt handler at all. PCI INTx is level-triggered, so the
device held the line asserted, the kernel signalled EOI, and it fired again
immediately -- 72,000 interrupts a second, 83% of CPU0, starving the tick.
The e1000's handler read ICR as zero half a million times, correctly
answering "not mine", which is what made it look like a network-free problem.
Reading virtio's ISR byte clears it and drops the line. That is the fix.
irq_dispatch now measures each line's rate against the TSC -- not ticks,
which is the first casualty of a storm -- and names the attached handlers
once above 20000/s. It reproduces the original fault as a single line.
Found along the way, and fixed because they were real:
- lapicinit loaded TICR with xv6's uncalibrated 10000000, whose own comment
admitted it was never measured. calibrate_timers() now measures the LAPIC
and the TSC against the 8254 PIT. (It came back at 999.9 MHz, so this was
not the bug -- but the next machine is not obliged to be 1 GHz.)
- microdelay() was an empty function body. Every microdelay(1000) in the
xHCI reset path and the USB hub power-on sequence returned instantly.
- HZ is a constant in param.h now, not the literal 100 written out at a
dozen ticks-to-seconds conversions. USER_HZ is separate and deliberately
does not follow it: musl answers sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK) with 100 always, so
times() and /proc/stat scale at the syscall boundary the way Linux does.
- TIOCGWINSZ answered a hardcoded 24x80. gfx_cols()/gfx_rows() have known
the real geometry all along; at 1024x768 the console is 128x48, so every
program that lays out a screen was formatting for the wrong one.
- TCFLSH fell through to the catch-all `return 0`, claiming to discard
input without discarding any.
uptime now advances 5.01 seconds per 5 real seconds. schfs-check passes.
Full investigation, including the two wrong hypotheses and the measurement
flaw that protected them, in docs/history/kernel.md section 13.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
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.