A thread is a struct proc that shares three counted objects with others of
its group: the address space (struct mm: page tables, heap top, VMAs and a
lock for changing them), the descriptor table, and the signal dispositions.
clone() shares what its flags say and fork() copies.
- clone(): pthread_create's shape (VM, FILES, SIGHAND, THREAD, SETTLS,
PARENT_SETTID, CHILD_CLEARTID) and posix_spawn's (VM, VFORK, a stack).
- futex: WAIT, WAIT_BITSET with timeouts, WAKE, REQUEUE, CMP_REQUEUE, keyed
by the word's kernel address so shared pages meet. set_tid_address keeps
the word that exit zeroes and wakes, for pthread_join.
- exit ends a thread; exit_group, a fatal signal, or the leader exiting ends
them all. reapd frees exited threads; the leader is reaped by its parent
once the rest are gone. getpid is the group, gettid the thread.
- Stops and resumes reach every thread; other process signals the leader.
- exec kills the other threads and unshares the dispositions.
- No TLB shootdown, so pages unmapped from a shared address space are freed
only once every CPU has reloaded CR3 or is idle.
- procfs: /proc lists processes, task/ lists threads, comm, Threads:, Tgid.
- The console honours VMIN 0 / VTIME (btop's input drain hung on it).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
busybox wget hands TLS to ssl_client over a socketpair and then does
shutdown(SHUT_WR). That cut the AF_UNIX link both ways, so ssl_client's
reply was a SIGPIPE and every https:// download hung. SHUT_WR is now a
half-close: the peer reads EOF and can still answer. TCP sockets get
shutdown() at all (tcp_shutdown for the FIN); it used to do nothing.
- exec keeps ignored signals and the signal mask, as execve(2) says.
- /proc/<pid>/fd: a link per descriptor -- the path it was opened by,
socket:[n], pipe:[n], anon_inode:[eventpoll]. /proc/self too. The
global inode bit moves above pid << 8; at 0x10000 it was /proc/256.
- fstat on a socket or pipe answers S_IFSOCK / S_IFIFO instead of EINVAL.
- poll, select and epoll wake as soon as a pipe, socket or input device
changes, not on the next tick.
- Pipes are 64 KB of lazily allocated pages, copied in blocks, with
PIPE_BUF atomicity: 300 MB through `yes | head | wc` in 7 s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
Sixty-five headers sat side by side in include/, so `#include "irq.h"`
said nothing about where irq.h was or what it belonged to, and errno.h,
stat.h and fcntl.h at the top shadowed the system's for any host tool
built with -I./include. They are in folders now -- arch/ core/ fs/
dev/ gfx/ net/ uapi/ (and ldls/ for the Linux driver layer) -- and
every include names the folder, as Linux's do: "core/proc.h".
Done mechanically and checked the hard way: the kernel built from this
tree disassembles identically to the one built from the tree before
it. The full image boots, and userland is the same set of programs.
Paths in docs and comments follow; docs/guides/layout.md has a table
of what is where, and tools/fix-includes.py rewrites old-style
includes from the folders in the tree, for code written before this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
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.
