Groundwork for the unified loader: before the two paths can share code,
they have to agree on what they are producing, and until now they only
agreed by coincidence.
Every field of the loader/kernel hand-off was #defined in whichever file
happened to need it -- kernel/core/main.c, kernel/dev/vga.c,
kernel/arch/x86_64/e820.c, boot/bios/cdboot.S, boot/bios/stage2main.c and
boot/uefi/main.c, six copies of the same addresses. schboot.h existed for
exactly this and held only the entry magic and the RSDP slot, with a
comment describing the rest of the block it did not define.
The whole block lives there now: the VBE info fields, the verbose and
media flags (with the real-mode segment:offset spelling cdboot.S needs),
the e820 count, map and cap, and the RSDP. Every one of those files
includes it instead of restating it.
This is not a tidy-up. It is the same hazard as defining the entry magic
twice, only quieter -- nothing breaks until one copy moves, and the two
loaders diverging is precisely what produced the EFER.SCE and RSDP bugs,
where a fix on one path silently did not exist on the other.
Verified on both firmwares: BIOS boots to schinit with the same e820,
ACPI and VGA lines as before; UEFI reaches cpu0 with 1018 MB in 7 regions
and its own 1280x800 mode. `make iso` still builds. bootcheck 108 [ok].
Next: the loaders become starters that gather firmware-specific facts and
hand to one common stage. That needs the BIOS side to climb to long mode
first, since common code can only be compiled for one CPU mode -- which
is the risky part, and is why the contract went first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Moving the mouse repainted the whole screen. At 1280x800 that is a
million pixels of desktop fill, every surface re-blitted, and a 4 MB copy
to the framebuffer -- per event. Under emulation the pointer lagged the
mouse by whole seconds, and that was not the emulation's fault: moving a
10x10 cursor does not require touching four megabytes.
Two changes, and the second matters as much as the first.
Damage tracking: one rectangle, unioned from whatever actually changed,
and only those rows are redrawn and copied out. A pointer move damages
where it was and where it is; a commit damages that surface; a client
going away damages what it had. One rectangle rather than a list, because
in practice the changes are a cursor and the window under it, and a list
costs more bookkeeping than it saves.
Draining input: a single mouse movement produces a burst of EV_REL ending
in EV_SYN, and the loop handled one event per poll and repainted. So the
compositor rendered every intermediate position of a cursor that was
never seen at those positions. Both queues are now drained before
anything is painted. handle_input grew a distinct "queue empty" return
for it -- EV_SYN changes nothing but is not the end of the burst, and a
drain that stopped there would leave the rest queued.
Also cuts the loader's resolution prompt from four seconds to one and a
half, on both the BIOS and UEFI paths. Four was mine and it was too long:
it is paid on every unattended boot, and adding four seconds to every
start to offer a menu nobody usually wants makes the common case worse to
serve the rare one.
schcom-test passes, including two overlapping clients and stacking order.
bootcheck 108 [ok].
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
GOP instead of VBE, and the same reasoning. There are no mode numbers
worth hardcoding here: the firmware publishes however many modes the
hardware can do and which index means what varies by machine, so the menu
is built by walking them. Press R within four seconds for a list, then
either a mode number or Enter to type a size. 800x600 stays the floor.
Fixes a header bug this is the first code to notice. The spec's order in
EFI_GRAPHICS_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL_MODE is MaxMode then Mode; efi.h had them
swapped. Info, SizeOfInfo and FrameBufferBase sit at the same offsets
either way because both fields are UINT32, so the framebuffer worked
perfectly and nothing was wrong until something asked how many modes
existed -- and was told the current mode number instead. Zero, on a
machine reporting thirty.
QueryMode and SetMode were void* padding and now have real prototypes;
ConIn likewise, so the loader can read a key. Under OVMF the console
includes the serial line, which is where `make qemu-uefi` puts it and
where the person actually is -- the same mistake the BIOS menu made first
time round.
Verified over serial against OVMF: 30 modes enumerated; picking listed
mode 14 gives 1280x1024; typing 1024x768 gives 1024x768; no key keeps the
firmware's mode and boots. All reach schinit. bootcheck 108 [ok].
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
find_rsdp() scanned the EBDA and 0xE0000-0x100000. That is a BIOS
convention, and UEFI firmware is under no obligation to leave a copy
there -- OVMF does not. So the kernel found no RSDP, no MADT and no
IOAPIC, and nothing routed IRQ 4. Serial output is polled, so the machine
booted all the way to a shell prompt and then ignored every key, which
reads as a broken console rather than a missing table.
The UEFI loader reads the RSDP out of the EFI configuration table,
preferring ACPI 2.0 for its XSDT, and leaves it at SCHBOOT_RSDP_ADDR --
the same low-memory hand-off block the e820 map already uses, now
described in include/schboot.h so the two sides cannot disagree.
The kernel validates it rather than trusting it: the BIOS path never
writes that slot, so there it holds whatever was in memory, and following
a wild pointer faults before there is anything to report the fault with.
Signature and checksum do that. It deliberately does not require 16-byte
alignment -- that rule is about searching the BIOS area, and OVMF's RSDP
sits at 0x3f77e014, so demanding it threw away the one address this code
exists to use.
UEFI now reports "acpi: 1 cpu, lapic at ..., ioapic id 0" and the ISO
boots to an interactive shell: uname, ls /bin (241), writing and reading
a file, ps, /proc/schfs -- all driven over serial.
BIOS unchanged: bootcheck 108 [ok], same ACPI line as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Loads the kernel from the ESP, places its ELF segments, records the
framebuffer, translates the UEFI memory map into E820 entries, exits boot
services, builds the page tables the kernel expects and jumps. Verified
under OVMF: the kernel starts, brings up PCI, VGA, e1000 and the RTC, and
reaches "cpu0: starting".
UEFI structures are written from the specification rather than importing
gnu-efi or EDK II -- a large dependency for two hundred lines of use, and
a licensing question the project does not need to answer. clang emits
PE/COFF directly, so this needs no new toolchain.
The kernel gained a second entry point. The multiboot entry is 32-bit
code that climbs into long mode itself, and firmware that already put us
there would have to drop back down only to climb out again -- a mode
switch whose failure mode is a triple fault with no console. So entry.S
publishes its 64-bit entry the same way it publishes the multiboot
header: a magic to scan for, SCH64BOO, with include/schboot.h owning the
constants so the two cannot disagree. That header goes *after* the
multiboot header, never before: header_addr says the multiboot header
lives at mboot_load_addr, and the BIOS loader computes the kernel's file
offset from it.
The kernel loads its own GDT at that entry rather than the loader doing
it. Arriving in long mode means arriving on the firmware's descriptors,
and the first thing depending on the kernel's own selectors faulted --
"unexpected trap 13 ... cs=38", a long way from the cause.
KNOWN LIMITATION, diagnosed and not yet fixed: e820_init takes the usable
run *containing the kernel*, which under OVMF ends at 8 MB -- the
firmware places an ACPI NVS region at 0x800000, so the run is genuinely
fragmented. The map is truthful and untruncated (21 entries); the
assumption of one contiguous run is BIOS-shaped. The fix is for the
kernel to free each usable region rather than one range, which touches
kalloc and deserves its own change rather than the tail of this one.
BIOS boot is unaffected: 27 checks, no failures.
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.
