What installing and starting Epiphany ran into:
- inotify: inotify_init/init1, add_watch, rm_watch, as a new kind of event
descriptor. The filesystem reports creates, deletes, renames (with a
cookie pairing MOVED_FROM and MOVED_TO), writes, close-after-write,
truncation and attribute changes, to watches on the inode and on its
directory with the name. ONESHOT, MASK_ADD, MASK_CREATE, ONLYDIR,
DONT_FOLLOW, IGNORED on removal, Q_OVERFLOW, and Linux's coalescing of
repeated events. The hooks cost one load when nothing is watched. Without
it GLib found no file monitor and GNOME programs aborted.
- FIONREAD on inotify descriptors and pipes (inotifywait sizes its buffer
by it).
- fsync and fdatasync had no Linux numbers since the first commit: GLib's
atomic writes, gtk-update-icon-cache and dbus-uuidgen all got ENOSYS.
- faccessat2, the flags-taking faccessat musl uses for any flags.
- sendmsg accepts SCM_CREDENTIALS when they are the sender's own, as Linux
checks; GDBus sends them in every handshake and was refused with EINVAL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
- SIGSTOP/SIGTSTP/SIGTTIN/SIGTTOU stop, SIGCONT resumes; the parent gets
SIGCHLD and wait4 reports WUNTRACED/WCONTINUED; ps shows T. Ctrl-Z works,
and mc no longer hangs waiting for its subshell to stop.
- Blocking reads (console, pty, pipe) and sleeps take a pending stop and
carry on after SIGCONT; a caught signal without SA_RESTART ends them
with EINTR.
- nanosleep reads tv_nsec (sleep 0.5 used to return at once), writes the
remainder, and clock_nanosleep understands TIMER_ABSTIME.
- rt_sigaction uses the k_sigaction layout for Linux-ABI processes: the old
action's restorer was written 112 bytes past the caller's struct. Flags
are kept; SIGKILL and SIGSTOP cannot be caught.
- F1..F12 reach programs, as the Linux console sends them (PS/2, USB, I2C).
- TIOCLINUX subcode 6 answers "no modifiers" instead of echoing the 6 back.
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
Gate 0's last structural row. kernel/core/kmem.c: slabs are pages from
kalloc() with a header at the front, and free objects hold the free list in
their own first eight bytes.
That last detail is the whole design. **An object carries no header and
freeing performs no search**: the page base of any object *is* its slab, and
the slab names its cache. It is also exactly why an object cannot exceed a
page, which matters below.
Two interfaces. kmem_cache_create/alloc/free for a subsystem with one kind of
thing -- it gets its own line in /proc/slab, which is most of why naming it is
worth the argument -- and kmalloc/kmfree over power-of-two classes from 16 to
2048 for code with no single type to build a cache around. Each cache keeps
partial and full lists; a slab that empties goes straight back to kalloc()
rather than being kept, so /proc/slab never overstates what is held.
`make kmem-test` asserts the bookkeeping on the build machine. Same arrangement
as schfs-objtest, and for the same reason: slab lists, free-list threading, the
page-to-cache lookup and whether pages actually come back are all things that
can be wrong without a kernel to be wrong in. 26 checks, including one that a
permissive allocator cannot pass -- write a distinct pattern through 512
objects and read them all back, because two objects sharing storage shows up
there and nowhere else.
One bug the test found immediately: kmem_max_obj() returned the raw page
remainder, which kmem_cache_create() then rounded *up* past its own limit. The
largest legal size was reported as illegal.
**It does not do what the register said it would.** The claim was that every
fixed table exists to work around kalloc. Measured:
struct proc 10656 NPROC 128 larger than a page
struct socket 4928 NSOCK 32 larger than a page
struct buf 4272 NBUF 256 larger than a page
struct inode 280 NINODE 200 a cache, bounded on purpose
struct device 120 NDEVICE 32 3.8 KB, never hit
struct file 48 NFILE 512 24 KB, never hit
The three largest cannot go in a page-backed slab whatever it does. NINODE is
a cache and is meant to be bounded. NFILE and NDEVICE are small enough that
their tables are rounding errors and their ceilings have never been reached.
Freeing the big ones needs a contiguous multi-page allocator, which is a
different thing and is not written. That is now in the register and in
docs/architecture/kernel.md rather than left as a claim nobody checked.
What it does fix is real, and was measured rather than assumed:
- **A pipe is 640 bytes and came from a whole 4096-byte page.** Every `|` in
a shell command burned three and a half kilobytes it never touched. Six
pipes per page now, and /proc/slab shows the page going back when they
close.
- **procread() built its answer in a 2048-byte array on the kernel stack**,
under a comment that had warned about exactly that since it was written --
it stayed a local because a whole page for 2 KB felt worse, and kmalloc is
the answer that was missing. Its frame is 64 bytes now instead of ~2100.
- procfs's other generator took a page from kalloc for the same 2 KB.
Verified on a boot: /proc/slab tracks pipe and kmalloc-2048 through real
pipelines, allocs and frees balance, and $(), ps, time, readlink, sigtest and
rename are all still green with no traps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.
