Commit graph SchOS/docs/architecture/filesystem.md
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nexoniarz
67db42b460 vfs: names up to 255 bytes and paths up to 4096, like Linux
Every path component was copied into a DIRSIZ buffer and every path
into a MAXPATH one, so names were cut at 29 bytes and paths at 127
without an error. Two names sharing their first 29 bytes opened the
same file, on SchFS and FAT alike, though both hold 255.

VFS_NAME_MAX (255) and VFS_PATH_MAX (4096) are the limits now, and
anything longer is ENAMETOOLONG. namex_from() takes its path buffers
from kalloc(), a page each, rather than putting two of them on an 8 KB
kernel stack. The v1 format still stores DIRSIZ bytes, and refuses a
longer name instead of matching on its first 30.

Checked: 255-byte names on SchFS and FAT (fsck.fat clean, and the FAT
name answers to its uppercase form), 256 refused, a 200-byte path and a
link to it, and no pages lost over 700 lookups through links.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
2026-10-23 11:17:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
7a1e63a553 fs: follow symlinks like Linux; Linux mknod; /proc/partitions
Symlinks are followed in namex_from() now, in the middle of a path as
well as at the end, and a relative target resolves from the directory
that holds the link rather than from the caller's cwd. `ln -s f d1/s;
cat d1/s` said "Symbolic link loop" because it looked for ./f. A loop is
ELOOP after 40 links, a dangling link ENOENT, and open(O_CREAT) through
a link to a file opens the file. divesymlink() is gone.

mknod from a Linux program passes (mode, dev) where the native call
passes (major, minor), and was read as the native one: `mknod n c 1 2`
made node 432,258, and mkfifo made a character device. Both are decoded
now; a FIFO is EPERM, and an existing name is EEXIST.

/proc/mounts listed devtmpfs twice: once from a fixed line and once
from the mount table. The fixed line is gone, and mount_add() refuses
a filesystem mounted on its own root, which is where a second devtmpfs
mount lands. A read-only FAT mount says ro.

/proc/partitions exists, in Linux's format, and /proc/filesystems lists
vfat.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
2026-10-23 10:50:41 +02:00
Nexoniarz
edb560de66 fat: FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 with long names, read and write
The filesystem every other system can read: a USB stick, an SD card, the
EFI system partition. It is here first for the hardware report, which has
to leave a machine on something that can be read on another one.

  mount -t vfat /dev/usb0p1 /mnt        (msdos and fat work too; -o ro)

Written from Microsoft's specification, and matched to Linux vfat where
the specification leaves a choice: 8.3 names with the NT lowercase bits,
long-name entries otherwise, Linux's alias rule (REPORTS, then BIGNUM~1),
case-insensitive lookup, UTC times, the boot-sector dirty bit, every FAT
copy and FSInfo kept up to date. It uses its own sector cache over the
new blkdev_xfer, since a partition need not be a whole number of 4 KB
blocks, and every operation that changes something reaches the disk
before it returns. Inode numbers come from the entry position, or the
first cluster for a directory, plus a small table for entries that moved.

Around it:
- /dev lists every disk and partition the block layer found (major 8,
  minor = block device), and raw reads and writes on them go by sector.
- The ESP and MBR FAT partitions are registered, typed so the root probe
  passes over them. MBR entries with a bad status byte are skipped, so a
  superfloppy's boot code is not read as a partition table.
- statfs, sync, fsync, umount (EBUSY while in use), shutdown, reboot and
  the power button all know about FAT.
- create undoes and reports a failed ialloc or dirlink (ENOSPC, EINVAL,
  EPERM) instead of panicking; fs_ops gains refuse_types and no_hardlinks.
- filewrite returns a short write instead of panicking on it.
- utimensat is implemented. As a stub returning 0 it made toybox touch
  believe the file existed, so `touch newfile` created nothing on any
  filesystem.

Tested in QEMU against mkfs.vfat images (FAT12 floppy, FAT16 on MBR,
FAT32 superfloppy and GPT ESP) by writing, renaming, deleting, filling to
ENOSPC and truncating there, then checking with fsck.fat -n and mtools on
the host: all clean, contents match.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
2026-10-23 09:33:35 +02:00
Nexoniarz
fdbd9bcf95 zsh: two more cache answers that claimed capabilities SchOS lacks
Checking the rest of ZSH_CACHE after the killesrch fix, on the principle that
one wrong answer in a hand-written block is rarely the only one. Two more, both
`yes`, both measurable on the running system in a line each.

**zsh_cv_sys_path_dev_fd=/dev/fd.** Neither /dev/fd nor /proc/self/fd exists --
/proc/self does not exist at all. So `<(cmd)` failed at the point of use with

    cat: /dev/fd/11: No such file or directory

which reads as a broken command rather than as a feature the system does not
have.

**zsh_cv_sys_fifo=yes.** mkfifo() does not fail here. It *succeeds*, and
produces a character device: mknod() turns S_IFIFO into a T_DEV and keeps the
major/minor, so `ls -l` shows `crw-rw-rw- 438, 0` where a `p` belongs, and
nothing written to it comes back out. Succeeding wrongly is what made `yes`
look defensible.

Both `no` now. `<(cmd)` says "doesn't look like your system supports FIFOs",
which names the missing thing instead of blaming cat, and `$( )` is unaffected.

The two gaps are recorded in docs/architecture/filesystem.md rather than left
implied by a build flag -- named pipes and a path to one's own descriptors are
both real features, and neither exists.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 00:36:48 +02:00
Nexoniarz
370605452c rename: it was writing v1 dirents into a B-tree, and nobody noticed
`rename()` refused an existing destination, so write-to-a-temporary-then-rename
-- how every careful program saves a file -- failed on the second save of
anything. zsh's history was the visible case: `.zsh_history.new` accumulated
for ever and the history itself never updated.

An earlier attempt to fix this was reverted after it lost both files, and the
note it left behind blamed HTree slot reuse. That was the wrong suspect.

**sys_rename was removing the old name by hand.** memset a `struct dirent` to
zero and writei() it into the parent directory at the offset dirlookup()
returned. That is the v1 filesystem's on-disk layout, written directly,
bypassing dp->ops entirely. On SchFS a directory is a B-tree with an index over
it -- "the record at that offset" is not a thing, and writing zeroes there
corrupted the directory while leaving the name in the index. Adding a second
removal on top of a corrupting one is how both files disappeared.

Every other caller in the file already used dirunlink(). This one had been
open-coding a filesystem it no longer ran on, and the bug stayed invisible for
as long as nothing asked it to remove two names instead of one.

With that corrected, replacing the destination is the straightforward thing it
should always have been: look it up, refuse if it is a directory, unlink it,
drop its nlink. rename(a, a) returns 0 and touches nothing, per POSIX -- both
names already reach the same file, and removing one to add it back is only
equivalent when nothing else is watching.

The lock discipline is inherited rather than invented, and it is the delicate
part: dp_old and dp_new are frequently the *same* directory reached through two
nameiparent() calls, which is two references to one inode. So no two directory
locks are held at once -- each is locked, used, unlocked before the next -- and
the source inode stays unlocked throughout, held alive by an nlink bump.

Directories are still refused, in both roles: moving one needs the `..` fixup
and the ancestor-loop check that are not written, and replacing one needs them
plus an emptiness test. EISDIR either way.

    mv a c        ->  0, c has a's contents
    mv c b        ->  0, b replaced, b has a's contents   (this is the fix)
    mv b b        ->  0, nothing happens
    mv nope z     ->  ENOENT
    mv b d/       ->  0, b lands inside d

60 create-and-rename cycles leave one file and 4 KB of disk, not 60. /root
holds .zsh_history and no .zsh_history.new, and a marker written in one boot is
still in the history file on the next.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-20 01:33:15 +02:00
Nexoniarz
75ccf9841c errno: -1 is EPERM, and four places were saying it by accident
Ctrl-C killed the shell. consoleread() breaks off the read in progress when
SIGINT arrives and returned -1 to do it -- and -1 is -EPERM by the time it
reaches a program, so every program that handles SIGINT by carrying on saw a
permanent error instead of an interrupted call:

    zsh: error on TTY read: operation not permitted
    schinitd: restarting os.schos.console-shell

and the next Ctrl-C did it to the replacement. EINTR now, which is what a
signal-interrupted read is required to give. Verified: Ctrl-C an interruptible
command, shell survives, zero restarts.

Same mistake, same file family: link, unlink, rename and renameat returned -1
on every error path. Callers branch on errno -- `if (unlink(p) < 0 && errno !=
ENOENT)` is the standard shape, and against EPERM it always complains -- which
is why zsh reported failures for things that had worked. They return ENOENT,
EEXIST, EXDEV, EISDIR, ENOTEMPTY and EFAULT now. About ninety other `return -1`s
remain in sys_fs.c; these four are done because these four were what a program
tripped over. /dev/mem's unknown minors return ENODEV rather than -1 too.

/dev/urandom was a linear congruential generator seeded with a **constant**, so
every boot produced the same bytes in the same order -- not weak, the same. A
key, a nonce, a temporary filename: shared with every SchOS machine that had
ever run. Seeded at boot from RDRAND where the CPU has it, from the cycle
counter and the wall clock where it does not, and re-stirred per byte. Still an
LCG and still not a CSPRNG; what changed is the part that was dangerous rather
than merely poor.

**Not fixed, and recorded as such:** rename() still will not replace an existing
target, so zsh's history save fails on every exit after the first. An attempt to
unlink the target first was reverted -- the directory is an HTree, dirunlink
followed by dirlink of the same name did not behave, and it panicked in
filewrite with the old file already gone. Losing both files is worse than
refusing, so it refuses until the HTree's slot reuse is understood.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 22:12:28 +02:00
Nexoniarz
c874811679 fs: devtmpfs, so /dev is generated rather than written to a disk
A fresh boot spent 2600 ms in schinit's bootstrap() before printing its first
line, and the whole of it was device nodes. Measured rather than guessed: an
instrumented bootstrap reported 2600 ms on a fresh image and 0 ms on the next
boot, because the nodes already existed by then and mknod failed fast. The cost
was therefore invisible to anyone not building images -- which is to say,
invisible to everyone except whoever works on this.

Each node was a real inode on the root filesystem, and SchFS commits every
mutation as its own transaction group: a copy-on-write rewrite of the path to
the root, then an uberblock behind a cache flush. Twenty of those is seconds.

The duplication mattered more than the time. Major and minor numbers are the
kernel's -- devsw[] in kernel/dev/cdev.c is what they dispatch on -- and schinit
held a second copy of that mapping with nothing checking the two agreed. Adding
a character device meant editing a userspace program, and a wrong minor produced
a node that opened successfully and did nothing.

kernel/fs/devfs.c puts the table next to the thing it describes and serves /dev
behind the same fs_ops vtable procfs uses. The namespace is all it provides:
fileread and filewrite see T_DEV and go through devsw themselves, so a read
never reaches it. It is read-only, and dirlink and ialloc answer EROFS rather
than pretending -- a node exists because the kernel has the device, or it does
not exist.

This also makes /proc/filesystems true. It has advertised "nodev devtmpfs" for
as long as it has existed, against a kernel that had no such filesystem.

Two things found while measuring what remained:

  * The thirteen mknod() calls for /proc ran *after* the procfs mount, so every
    one was resolving a path into a read-only synthetic filesystem and failing.
    procfs.c's own note called them a fallback to be cleaned up later; they have
    been dead for longer than that.
  * The four mkdir() calls for mount points were the rest of it. They are made
    by the image builder now (sysroot-install), and the ones in init are a
    fallback -- a mkdir that fails because the directory exists costs a path
    walk and no writes, where creating one costs a transaction.

bootstrap() is now 0 ms on a fresh image, down from 2600.

init opens /dev/console after the mount rather than mknod'ing a node called
"console" into the root directory, which is what used to leave a stray /console
in `ls /`. The old path is kept as a fallback: if the mount fails there is no
/dev/console and no way to report it.

socktest passes, /proc still lists per-process directories, ps -e still
enumerates.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 20:18:30 +02:00
Nexoniarz
57aff40228 docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap
docs/ was ten files where a plan, a description, a guide and a bug report all
sat next to each other. It is now architecture/ (what SchOS is), plan/ (what it
will be), guides/ (how to work on it) and history/ (why it is like this), with
an index that states the one rule holding it together: when something is
finished it moves from plan/ to architecture/ and is rewritten as a description
of the thing rather than a record of building it.

A ticked checkbox says the work happened. It does not say what the work
*produced*, and six months later the checkbox is all that is left. The network
stack proved the point: finished, verified end to end, and for a month the only
description of it anywhere was a checkbox four levels of indentation deep.

So roadmap.md went from 534 lines to 181 -- nothing deleted, the done work
graduated. Seven subsystems that were finished and undescribed now have
descriptions: boot, kernel, syscalls, filesystem, networking, graphics, usb,
init. Every one ends with "What it does not do", which is the section that pays;
a document listing only strengths is marketing, and the reader who needs it most
is the one about to trip over a limitation nobody wrote down.

schfs.md still opened with "phases 1 through 3 1/2 are done, phase 4 is next"
long after all five had landed. It is a description now, with the phase record
and the hard-won bugs moved to history/.

Three corrections found on the way, all load-bearing:

  * projects/schcom/README.md claimed SCM_RIGHTS was done. There is no
    sendmsg/recvmsg in the kernel at all, and an entire GUI plan rested on it.
  * The root README said "No TCP/IP" months after the stack landed.
  * history/kernel.md sec.7 was marked "in progress" on a problem that process
    groups solved.

Also adds plan/1.0.md, which draws a finish line so the open list stops being
infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is
the window manager, so that split dissolves rather than being abandoned.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00