The menu shipped working only for someone driving the emulated keyboard,
which is nobody. `make qemu` runs -serial mon:stdio, so the terminal the
developer is sitting in front of is the serial line -- and the menu read
INT 16h, which is the PS/2 keyboard. Keys went nowhere.
The prompt was invisible for a second reason: BIOS teletype writes to the
VGA text screen, and `make qemu` attaches virtio-gpu alongside stdvga and
shows that one, so the text landed on a display nobody was looking at.
So print16 now writes to both the screen and COM1, and the menu accepts a
key from either source. The transmitter wait is bounded, because a machine
with no serial port reads 0xFF from the status register forever and would
otherwise hang the loader on exactly the hardware that cannot say why.
Also: four seconds rather than two, which is not long when the prompt has
to be read first; the chosen digit is echoed, because a serial line has no
local echo and the menu otherwise looks like it ignored the key; and the
timeout says "keeping 800x600" instead of silently moving on.
Verified three ways: typing r then 2 over serial gives 1024x768, sendkey r
then 3 on the keyboard gives 1280x1024, and no key at all prints the
timeout and boots 800x600. bootcheck 108 [ok].
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The VBE mode was the literal 0x143 in stage2.S, so 800x600 was the only
resolution the system could ever have. Real mode is the only place this
can be chosen: setting a mode is INT 10h, stage2main.c already runs in
protected mode, and the kernel has no modeset path -- so whatever is
picked here is what the framebuffer, the console and Schcom all get.
Press R at the prompt within two seconds for 800x600, 1024x768 or
1280x1024. It boots on its own otherwise: a loader that waits for a
keypress is a machine that does not come back up after a power cut.
The depth is checked before the mode is set, and that is not belt and
braces. 0x146 was in the table as 1600x1200x32 and this VBE returns
320x200x8 for it -- a mode the BIOS accepts, so an error return never
happens. It boots and then everything above renders garbage, because the
console, the fbdev ioctls and the compositor all assume 32bpp. Only
numbers verified to come back as the advertised size at 32bpp are listed
now, and anything else falls back to 800x600.
Verified by driving the monitor's sendkey: 1, 2 and 3 come up at
800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 respectively, all reaching schinit, and
no key at all still gives 800x600. bootcheck 108 [ok], schcom-test
passes.
Typing an arbitrary size is the obvious next step and deliberately not
guessed at here: it wants enumerating the BIOS's own mode list
(INT 10h AX=4F00) and matching on width and height, which would replace
the magic numbers rather than add more of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.
