The failure this is against is not scope creep. It is abandonment by promotion:
a thing gets built to the point where it works, the next thing becomes more
interesting, and the first is left in a corner -- in the tree, not finished, not
deleted, and not in any list. Enough of those and the tree stops matching its
own documentation.
docs/plan/1.0.md now holds the register, and it is the only place anything
half-built is listed. Four sections, because the kinds are genuinely different:
built and connected to nothing (the text layer, a font from disk, socket
activation, wait_vblank); started and stopped part-way (foundations 2-5, hybrid
H2, Schcom v0, a released PCI device that nothing brings back); named in a "what
it does not do" and still true; and frozen -- scoped, unstarted, not to be
started. The rule is that nothing enters except by being finished or deleted,
and that adding a row requires closing one.
1.0.md already said "two things in flight, never three". It was right and it was
not being followed.
Then the corners themselves, because a register written over a tree full of them
is just a longer list:
- cmd/init is deleted. Nothing had execed /bin/init since initcode.S changed
to /bin/schinit; it was built and installed on every image as an unreachable
fallback, and an unreachable fallback rots rather than saves.
- projects/schwm/ and projects/schde/ are deleted. Both said "to be deleted"
in their own first paragraph, which proves only that a directory marked for
deletion is not deleted by being marked. README-only, no code lost, and the
arguments each made are moved into wayland.md where they are still true.
- projects/schcom/schcom and schcom-demo were tracked binaries. Untracked, and
.gitignore'd.
Three code comments and one document described a boot that has not happened
since 7d44eb7. cons_serial_only starts set, but kmain clears it on its first
lines now, so the splash does not survive the boot and the kernel log is on
screen from the start. That reversal was earned by a Chromebox with no serial
port freezing at boot showing nothing at all, and the comments still argued the
losing side of it.
The site:
- a download page. One ISO, what it has actually been run on -- one machine,
under test -- Ventoy and dd, what the first boot looks like step by step,
and the build if you would rather. The support table names one Chromebox
rather than listing hardware, because one Chromebox is the entire bare-metal
record and a list would be fiction.
- Assets/usb.svg, drawn to the same rule as the other marks: two tones,
geometry only, the accent spent in one place, and that place is the activity
light because it is the part that tells you something is happening.
- Download is in both navs and is the hero's primary action; a closing band
ends the front page on it.
- the uberblock-slots and drivers-outside-the-kernel figures are gone. Three
numbers left, including the fastfetch one, which stays because it is funny.
Two things caught by rendering the pages instead of assuming: .hero p was
beating .filemeta on specificity and the file line was coming out at body size,
and the dd command was one line long enough that the card clipped it at `conv=`
-- a destructive command that can scroll half of itself out of view is a good
way to take somebody's disk. It is two lines now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
docs/plan/hybrid.md's first eviction. cmd/vgpud is the virtio-gpu driver as a
process: it finds the device by vendor and device id, asks the kernel for it,
and does the whole virtio 1.0 bring-up from outside -- reset, feature
negotiation, a virtqueue in DMA memory, GET_DISPLAY_INFO, RESOURCE_CREATE_2D,
ATTACH_BACKING, SET_SCANOUT, TRANSFER and FLUSH.
vgpud: virtio-gpu at 00:03.0, currently held by virtio-gpu
virtio-gpu: released to userspace; screen is the VBE framebuffer
vgpud: claimed
vgpud: display is 1280x800
vgpud: scanout is ours, framebuffer at physical 0x3eceb000
vgpud: drew a test pattern from userspace
Verified by screendumping the virtio-gpu head: the pattern is there, with a
checkerboard that would shear if the stride were wrong. The console carries on
in VBE on the other head at the same time, which is the fallback rule from the
plan working rather than being described.
No syscall knows this is a GPU. The kernel handed over a PCI device and the
process decided what it was -- which is the property that makes this a general
mechanism, and the reason the evictions come before anything foreign.
Four things the first real driver needed that the test program had not:
- PCI config space (PCIIOC_CFG). A virtio device says where its registers
are in vendor capabilities, which live in config space, so a driver that
cannot read it cannot find its own registers.
- a way for the incumbent to let go: struct pci_driver gained a release
hook. A driver without one keeps its device, which is always safe and for
anything on the path to a shell is also correct.
- the outgoing driver freeing its DMA. Releasing the device but keeping its
4 MB framebuffer is half a handover -- the incoming driver asks for one and
is told there is no room.
- a 16 MB DMA arena. 4 MB was exactly one framebuffer at this resolution,
and either side of a handover there are two.
And one bug it reproduced on its first working run: vgpud polls the used ring,
so it registered no interrupt handler, and a virtio device interrupts on every
completion. The storm detector said so immediately --
irq 11: 77780 interrupts/second -- a device on this line is not
acknowledging it. handler 'e1000' is attached
-- naming the line, the rate and the neighbour it was drowning. One line fixes
it (VRING_AVAIL_F_NO_INTERRUPT before the queue is enabled), and that detector
was worth every minute it cost.
include/virtio.h moved out of the driver directory. Its own comment said it
should when a second reader appeared; one has.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
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
Same disease as the network stack, one subsystem over. kernel/dev/vga.c
was three things wearing one name: the owner of the framebuffer, a
bitmap drawing library, and the text console. Only the first is a
driver, and because they shared a file they shared a prefix -- so
panic.c drew the crash screen with vga_fill_rect, console.c printed with
vga_putc, /dev/fb0 handed out vga_fb_phys, and every one of those files
named a display driver it had no business knowing about.
Split three ways:
- kernel/drivers/gpu/vga/vga_fb.c owns the VBE framebuffer -- the mode
the loader programmed and handed over, the aperture, and the display
class vtable. It is a driver and now lives with the driver that
finds the card on the bus.
- kernel/dev/gfx.c draws: pixels, shapes, glyphs, the cursor, scroll,
the ANSI erase operations. It names no driver. The framebuffer
arrives through gfx_attach_scanout(), so a driver publishes what it
owns and this file draws on it without knowing what it is.
- include/gfx.h is the interface, and says why it is deliberately not
the display class: that one is about frames -- acquire, present,
vblank -- and the crash screen has to work when nothing else does.
main() no longer calls a display driver. platform_register_devices()
takes the framebuffer address and brings up whatever owns it, which is
where driver names belong; kernel/drivers/registry.c is the file whose
entire job is naming every driver in the kernel.
virtio-gpu got the e1000 treatment as well: instances in an array, the
instance hung on dev->priv by an `attached` hook, and every op reading
it rather than a file-static. It refused the second adapter outright
before, which is not hypothetical -- integrated plus discrete is an
ordinary laptop. The VGA driver deliberately has no such hook, and says
so: there is one framebuffer the loader programmed however many
VGA-class controllers the bus turns up, and a second one publishing the
same scanout is the truth rather than a bug.
Private headers moved next to their drivers: include/virtio.h and
include/xhci.h each had exactly one includer. include/ is for headers
the rest of the kernel needs.
Deleted rather than moved: consoleinit() programmed the sixteen ANSI
colours into the VGA DAC and disabled text-mode blink, by writing ports
0x3C0-0x3C9 from the console. The comment three lines above the colour
table already said this does nothing in a 32bpp linear mode -- there is
no palette to index -- so it was both dead and in the wrong file.
Verified, and this is a refactor so the evidence is that nothing moved:
- bootcheck -Fb -Net: 59 [ok], no failures. That covers the console
through every command, /dev/fb0's geometry, writing pixels through
write() and mapping the framebuffer through mmap.
- make crashshot: the crash screen renders exactly as before --
shapes, glyphs, logo and QR code -- which is the whole of gfx.c
exercised at once, in a panic, with the scanout attached by a driver.
- make schcom-test: five pixel assertions from the host oracle still
pass, so the display class and the compositor above it are unmoved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nexoniarz