1449 lines of boot/bios/, tools/sign.pl and tools/padstage2.pl, plus the
build rules, the disk image and the ISO entry that existed to carry them.
Everything since roughly 2012 boots UEFI, and CSM -- the firmware-side
BIOS emulation that lets a legacy loader run on such a machine at all --
has been going away since Intel dropped support for it in 2020. So this
is not a path being retired early; it is one whose remaining hardware is
already the exception.
The cost was never the code, it was the tax on everything near it. Stage
2 had a 65-sector ceiling it overflowed silently -- 25440 bytes against
24576 -- and because the kernel is written at sector 1 + STAGE2_SECTORS,
an overflowing loader was overwritten by the very kernel it was loading.
The resolution list could not be shared with UEFI either: VBE mode
setting is INT 10h, so matching it needed unreal mode, which is the
riskiest code in the tree for a feature that already worked elsewhere.
What replaces schos.img is the staged ESP, handed to QEMU as a virtual
FAT volume. That is a development arrangement and not an installable
disk; a real GPT image with a real FAT partition is the installer's job,
and until it exists nothing here writes a disk a machine boots unaided.
Secure Boot is untouched too -- the loader is unsigned.
The ISO keeps one El Torito entry, the FAT image holding loader and
kernel. It never booted from a USB stick via BIOS anyway: the firmware
presents the stick as a hard disk while stage2main.c read the kernel back
over ATAPI.
The 32-bit multiboot entry in entry.S now has no caller and is left in
place. Deleting kernel entry code is its own change with its own way of
failing silently, and it should not ride along with this one.
Ported with it: run.ps1, the six screenshot tools, and schcom_test.sh,
each with its own OVMF varstore copy so no run inherits another's UEFI
variables.
Two things this shook out. OVMF now belongs in `all`: nothing boots
without firmware, `make clean` wipes build/ including the copy fetched
from the host, and a clean followed by a build left every run script
throwing. And it cannot be listed as a prerequisite at the top of the
file -- make expands prerequisites when it reads the line, and
$(OVMF_CODE) is defined further down, so naming it there appends nothing
and says nothing.
Verified from a clean tree: 110 [ok] and no failures on the full suite,
the ISO boots with no hard disk attached, schfs-check passes, schcom's
end-to-end pixel test passes, and fbshot captures a real 1280x800 frame.
The compositor already walked a surface table, but nothing had ever run
two clients at once, so "it composites" rested on a single rectangle.
schcom-test now starts two overlapping clients and checks the overlap
region from the host: the later surface has to win there. A compositor
that cannot order two surfaces cannot host a window manager, and that is
the property SchWM will be built on.
Two bugs in the test itself, both of which would have read as compositor
faults:
- it waited for the first "committed" line and screenshotted then, so
the second client had not drawn yet. It waits for both now.
- one probe point sat at 400,300 -- dead centre of an 800x600 screen,
which is exactly where the pointer is drawn. Moved clear of it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Clients connect over a Unix socket, are handed a shared buffer, draw into
it and commit; Schcom composites and presents. Both of the hard blockers
its README listed -- unix domain sockets and raw input events -- have been
done for a while, so nothing was in the way.
The model is Wayland's, on purpose. A surface is not a window: it is a
rectangle of pixels with no policy attached, because placement belongs to
SchWM and the moment this program starts deciding where windows go the
split has failed. Nothing is shown until COMMIT, so a client halfway
through drawing is never presented. The compositor tells clients when to
draw rather than letting them render frames nobody sees.
Wayland is MIT-licensed and supporting it later is intended, so the
divergences are the ones that are cheap to undo: a buffer handle is a
System V shm id rather than an fd over SCM_RIGHTS, and the message
carries a handle_kind field so switching is a new value rather than a
protocol break. Every message carries its own length, so an unknown
message is skipped instead of desynchronising the stream -- which is what
lets a v0 compositor survive a v1 client.
The compositor owns the shm segment, not the client: it has to survive a
client crashing mid-frame, and it must not be something a client can
resize underneath it. A dropped connection takes its surfaces and their
segments with it.
Composites into a back buffer and copies once, because compositing
straight into the framebuffer shows every intermediate state -- the
flicker would be the whole desktop being repainted under the user's eyes.
projects/ gets build glue for the first time: `make projects` builds
against the sysroot's libc and stages into sysroot/bin. It is not a
dependency of anything above it, and `make` never descends there.
Verified by `make schcom-test`, which boots SchOS, runs the compositor and
a client, screendumps the framebuffer and asserts the pixels on the host.
That last part is the point -- the compositor reporting that it
composited something proves nothing, and a screenshot nobody inspects
proves less. It checks the client's colour mid-surface, the compositor's
background, and the white border exactly at the requested origin, so
"arrived" and "arrived at the wrong offset" cannot pass for each other.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
