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
The scheduler was xv6's round-robin: run everything RUNNABLE in slot
order and yield on every timer tick. Slot order is not fairness, a
process alone on a CPU paid a full context switch a hundred times a
second to be handed straight back to itself, and there was no way to
say that one thing mattered more than another.
Every process now carries vruntime, the CPU time it has used divided
by its weight, and the scheduler runs the runnable process with the
smallest. Fairness and interactivity both fall out of that one rule;
nice is a weight, 1.25x per level as UNIX has always had it. A slice
is 20 ms shared among the runnable processes, never below 2 ms, and
the timer tick preempts only once it is spent. A process waking from
a long sleep is brought up to min_vruntime less one period, so it is
scheduled promptly without being owed everything it slept through;
fork inherits vruntime, so forking does not reset a debt.
getpriority/setpriority are real, with Linux's offset of 20 on the
return; /proc/<pid>/schedstat and the ctxt_switches lines of status
report what the scheduler did. docs/architecture/scheduler.md has the
reasoning, including why the run queue is still a scan of ptable.
This was written in an earlier session and left uncommitted. Finished
here: a signal waking a sleeper goes through the same vruntime floor
as wakeup() does, and sched_yield() yields -- it returned 0 doing
nothing, harmless while every tick was a yield and a spin of a whole
slice once ticks stopped being one.
Checked under QEMU on 1 and 4 CPUs: a nice 10 loop beside a nice 0
one gets about a tenth of a shared CPU, and a command typed meanwhile
answers in 26 ms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
`jmp mpenter`.
x86-64 requires rsp to be 16-byte aligned immediately before a `call`, so a
function starts with rsp ending in 8 -- the return address -- and its
`push %rbp; mov %rsp,%rbp` prologue leaves %rbp 16-byte aligned. Compilers
build on that: an aligned vector store to a frame slot is `movaps`, and
`movaps` to a misaligned address is #GP.
entry64mp loaded the AP's stack pointer, which is page-aligned, and *jumped*.
Nothing pushed a return address, so %rbp came out eight bytes off -- on every
frame, on every application processor, for the life of the machine.
It cost nothing for as long as no function an AP ran needed an aligned vector
store. Then the console's glyph path started returning a small struct by value
(the cell-as-a-surface change), clang spilled it with movaps, and CPU 1 took a
#GP the instant it announced itself on a verbose boot:
unexpected trap 13 from cpu 1 rip ffff800000120a3b <draw_glyph_px+0x1cb>
120a37: 0f 10 45 90 movups -0x70(%rbp), %xmm0
120a3b: 0f 29 45 b0 movaps %xmm0, -0x50(%rbp) <- #GP
movups on the line above loads fine; movaps stores and faults. The
displacement is a multiple of 16, so what is misaligned is %rbp itself, which
is a fact about how the function was entered.
`call mpenter`, not `jmp`. Eight bytes for an ABI the whole toolchain assumes.
**It was hiding behind a second bug.** The first report was not a #GP at all:
Stop code ACQUIRE
#2 cprintf+0xae
#3 trap+0x2c4
trap() reported the fault with cprintf(), cprintf() takes the console lock,
and the faulting code was already holding it -- on a verbose boot every
character is drawn under that lock. acquire() panicked about a lock its own
call chain owned, and the trap number, the faulting address and the registers
were all lost. A kernel-mode trap ends in panic() a dozen lines later anyway,
so the console goes into panic mode *before* the report rather than during it.
**And a third, in the same boot.** The console reported "JetBrains Mono, 8x16
cells" -- a name from one font and metrics from another. The built-in bitmap
became a provider like any other in the previous commit, so draw_glyph_px()
installs it lazily on the first glyph; on a verbose boot that happens before
gfx_font_init() runs, which then returned early because a font was already
installed. The console spent the whole boot in the fallback while claiming not
to be. "A font is installed" and "a typeface was chosen" had been the same test
and quietly stopped being; they are two flags now.
Verified: verbose boot reaches a shell twice running with no traps and no
panics, and reports 10x21 cells -- the real typeface -- where it reported 8x16
before. Both supported configurations quiet: one boot each, no traps, no
panics, socktest and memfdtest green.
Written up as section 22 of docs/history/kernel.md, because the interesting
part is not the missing eight bytes but that three separate faults had to be
peeled off in order before the first one could be seen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four Gate 0 rows, and a fifth found while checking one of them.
**getrusage() did not distinguish RUSAGE_CHILDREN from RUSAGE_SELF**, which
undersells it: it ignored `who` entirely and reported the machine's *uptime*
as the caller's user time. Every process of every age answered with the same
number. Per-process CPU time is sampled at the timer tick now and split on the
interrupted privilege level; children's time is rolled up in wait() rather than
exit(), because RUSAGE_CHILDREN means *reaped* children and a running one has
not contributed yet.
**And wait4()'s fourth argument is a `struct rusage *` that was read off the
stack and thrown away.** That is the one shells actually use -- wait3() is the
same syscall with pid -1 -- so zsh's `time` reported
16777216.01s user 1073.78s system 927983249% cpu
for every command. 2^24 seconds is uninitialised memory, and it did not vary
with the workload because it was never written. Now:
busy loop 2.66s user 97% cpu 2.720 total
sleep 2 0.02s user 0% cpu 2.248 total
ls -lR / 0.70s user 65% cpu 1.070 total
**ru_stime is a structural zero and says so.** MSR_SFMASK includes FL_IF, so
SYSCALL clears interrupts and no tick can land while a process is inside a
syscall. Tick sampling cannot see kernel time at all here. Charging it needs
TSC deltas closed and reopened around every sched(), which is scheduler
accounting rather than sampling; the limitation is written down in
docs/architecture/kernel.md rather than papered over.
**/proc/<pid>/exe is a symlink.** It also needed a real st_size, and every
other procfs file deliberately reports zero -- readlink(2) bounds its copy by
it, so a symlink of size 0 resolves to the empty string, which looks like it
worked and is worse than the regular file was. Generating that one path in
ilock() costs one small render per stat() of one file.
**OVMF memory reporting is closed**: 1 GB reports 1017 MB usable, 2 GB reports
2041 MB. The firmware keeps about 7 MB either way, which is the right shape.
**And `ps` printed a header and nothing else**, which is not in any list
because nobody had run it. `ps` with no arguments shows only processes on
*this* terminal; /proc/<pid>/stat hardcoded tty_nr to 0, so nothing could ever
match. `ps -e` always worked, which is exactly what hid it. p->ctty was already
tracked -- procfs simply was not asked. Fields 14..17 were hardcoded zero too,
so TIME read 00:00:00 however long a process had run; they carry the new
counters now, and a shell that has burned 653 ticks reports 00:00:06.
Verified: utime climbs 18 -> 653 across a loop in the shell itself, `ps` lists
its own terminal, `ps -e` still lists everything, `readlink /proc/1/exe` gives
/bin/schinit, and sigtest/$()/rename/dmesg are all still green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Painting every kernel stack at allocation and scanning it on each trap puts the
high-water mark at **3736 of 4096 bytes** -- 91%, in netd, inside lwIP's input
path. 360 bytes of headroom on a kernel that takes interrupts on the current
stack is not headroom: a timer landing at that depth pushes a trapframe and
runs trap() straight off the bottom of the page and into whatever kalloc handed
out next, which is very often another process's kernel stack.
The canary at kstack[0] did not catch this and could not have. It is checked on
trap entry and exit, and a frame allocated in one `sub $N, %rsp` steps clean
over the bottom eight bytes and writes below them without ever touching it. It
catches a slow walk past the end, not one deep call.
8192 now, and the stacks are static -- one per ptable slot, NPROC * KSTACKSIZE
= 1 MB of BSS. Static rather than a bigger kalloc because kalloc() hands out
exactly one page and there is no contiguous multi-page allocator to ask. A
process's slot is fixed for its lifetime, so the stack belonging to that slot is
the natural answer: no allocation to fail, no free to forget, and the kalloc
failure path in allocproc() goes away with it. The page was being paid for out
of kalloc before, one at a time, and undercounted.
**And the AP scheduler stack was already wrong.** startothers() did
`stack = kalloc()` for one page and then handed the AP `stack + KSTACKSIZE` as
its stack top. Exactly right for as long as KSTACKSIZE happened to equal
PGSIZE, and a whole page past the allocation the moment it did not -- which
this commit would have made true. That is not a throwaway boot stack either:
the AP runs mpmain() and then scheduler() on it for the rest of the machine's
life, and takes interrupts on it whenever no process is current. Static too,
NCPU of them.
**This does not fix the intermittent zsh crash**, and the measurement above was
taken while looking for it. It is worth saying plainly: 1-3 shells per boot
still die, so the hypothesis was wrong and the stack was a separate latent bug
that the search turned up.
What the search did establish is worth more than the guess was:
- **It is SMP-only.** Three boots at -smp 1: zero faults. Three at -smp 2:
one, three, one.
- **It is not only zsh.** schinitd took one too.
- **The faults name their cause if you print enough.** `rip 0x0` is a process
handed a zero and following it, not a process that branched anywhere. And
schinitd's `addr 0xffffffffffffffea` is -22, which is -EINVAL: a call
returned an error and the caller used it as a pointer.
So trap.c dumps registers, segments, and the top of the user stack for a fault
at rip below a page or a faulting address near zero, the way it already did for
a GP fault. Neither of the two facts above was visible from the one-line
report, and both came out of the first dump that included them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
schdbgd bridges TCP to the debugger, which is the one way in that does not
need you to be sitting at the machine. It is a bridge and nothing else: a line
in becomes a line written to /dev/dbgro and the answer comes back, so `nc` is a
complete client and there is no clever client to be broken on the day you need
this.
# schdbgd &
schdbgd: debugger on port 4444, loopback only
$ nc 127.0.0.1 4444
dma
arena 0xffff80003da41000-0xffff80003ea41000 16384 KB total, ...
A kernel debugger plus a TCP socket is a remote root hole, so three things were
decided rather than discovered:
- It does not start by itself. schdbgd.job ships Disabled. SchOS has no
kernel command line, so the boot flag the plan asked for is the job
manifest, which is the same thing in this system's own idiom.
- It binds loopback; -a names an address and says so in a paragraph.
- It cannot reach a view that changes state, enforced in the kernel.
That last one is /dev/dbgro: /dev/dbg on minor 1. The minor is the one piece of
per-open state a character device already sees, so which node you opened is the
permission -- nothing to latch, nothing to remember between the write and the
read, no way across. Which views are refused comes from dbg_register_rw() on
the registration itself, because a central list of dangerous views goes stale
in the direction where a new view is quietly treated as safe. Today that is
`watch <addr>`; `watch` with no argument is still the listing and still
answered.
Also: socket() now accepts IPPROTO_TCP with SOCK_STREAM and IPPROTO_UDP with
SOCK_DGRAM. They name the default rather than departing from it, and toybox's
nc writes them out -- so TCP was "Protocol not supported" on a system whose
whole network is TCP.
docs/plan/debugger.md retires into docs/architecture/debugging.md; 16 files
repointed. Every plan in docs/plan/ that was open is now closed, so the next
thing is Gate 0 itself: the survey, with the instrument built.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
docs/plan/debugger.md D3 and D4, which finish the plan apart from the
network transport.
D3 -- `whose <addr>`. The views each speak for one subsystem, which is what
keeps them cheap and current, and it is exactly why none of them can see
the bug that matters: a page on the DMA arena's free list looks fine from
dma.c, the same page on kalloc's free list looks fine from kalloc.c, and
that it is on both is a fact no single subsystem holds.
# schdbg whose 0x3e239000
phys 0x000000003e239000 kernel va 0xffff80003e239000
dma arena, handed out
pcidma slot 2, 0 KB into a 4000 KB block given to pid 4 (vgpud)
mapped pid 4 (vgpud) at 0x000000004000d000 rwu vma[5] no_free
consistent: 1 owner, 1 mapping(s)
Claimants register the way views do -- one line in the file that owns the
data -- so the kernel image, the log region, the arena, the page allocator,
the pciuser DMA blocks and every page table each answer for themselves.
`mapped` is the one no allocator can answer: there is no reverse map, so
vm_walk_user() goes forward over every mapped page of every live process.
Two verdicts are shouted and everything else is reported as fact. More than
one owner means the second allocator to hand the page out is handing out
memory the first is still using -- the H2 bug, which would have printed as
three lines. Free-but-still-mapped means a page will be given away from
under the page tables that point at it. Deliberately *not* a finding: no
owner at all, because kalloc keeps a free list and no record of what it has
handed out, so an ordinary allocated page has nobody to speak for it and
saying otherwise would be the query crying wolf.
D4 -- watchpoints, on the four debug registers that had been sitting unused
since this kernel was written. Armed against the same framebuffer page and
then killing the driver:
watch 0: 0xffff80003e239000 written, 8 byte(s), by stosq+0x1f, pid 12 vgpud
#0 memset+0xba
#1 dma_alloc+0x2e2
#2 do_dma+0x22a
#3 pciuser_ioctl+0x13b
#4 sys_ioctl+0x3c7
#5 syscall+0xf6
The chain is the answer, not the rip. It reports and continues -- a data
watchpoint is a trap, delivered after the store completes, so returning
carries on with the program none the wiser, which is what lets this be used
on a machine that is still running.
Debug registers are per-CPU and there is no general IPI here, so the table
carries a generation number and each CPU reloads from its timer interrupt
when it notices the number has moved: one comparison per tick, one tick of
latency at worst. `watch` prints which CPUs have caught up, because "this
watchpoint is watching" and "this watchpoint is watching one CPU" must not
look the same.
Also fixed while testing: watch_init() was called from mpmain(), which runs
on every processor, so the command appeared in the list once per CPU.
dbg_register() now refuses a duplicate name outright, so the next init that
runs per-CPU fails loudly in the list rather than quietly doubling it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
docs/plan/debugger.md, milestones D0, D1 and D2. What they replace is the
ninety-second loop -- add a cprintf, rebuild, boot, read the serial log --
which answers exactly the one question you thought of before the rebuild.
The rule the shape follows: **it observes, it does not control.** No
stepping, no software breakpoints, no stopping the world. Half the bugs
this kernel produces are timing -- an interrupt storm, a level-triggered
line nobody acknowledges, a driver that faults only on its second start --
and every one of them disappears when you halt the machine to look. And
the layering rule, which is the circularity rule the display already has:
a debugger that needs lwIP cannot debug lwIP.
D0 -- symbols. tools/ksyms.pl turns the first link pass into a table the
second pass carries. Two passes is enough because .ksym is placed after
.text and .rodata, so carrying the table cannot move anything recorded in
it; the build lists both passes' text symbols and refuses to link if they
ever disagree, because a symbol table that is subtly wrong gives confident
false answers. ksym.c reads it through weak symbols, so pass one -- which
has no table -- still links. A crash chain now reads panic+0x5f <-
proc_sysrq_cmd+0x99 <- ... <- syscall+0xf6.
D1 -- a log that outlives the kernel. Every character through consputc()
lands in a byte ring with a timestamp per line, readable as /proc/kmsg.
It sits in a region carved before the page allocator gets anything, with a
magic header, so a kernel finds the previous kernel's log still there --
including the whole PSOGM report. panic.c's own comment said "there is no
core dump and no log to go back to"; that is no longer true.
The obvious place for it is the top of RAM beside the DMA arena. That
was the first attempt and the magic came back as ASCII on the reboot,
because the top of usable memory is exactly where the firmware makes its
own allocations. It lives above the kernel image instead, which is a
stable address across boots of the same build.
D2 -- the introspection registry. A subsystem publishes its state with one
line at the bottom of the file that owns the data:
dbg_register("dma", dma_dump, "the DMA arena's free extents");
Seven views -- dma, mem, proc, vma, claims, pci, sock -- reachable three
ways: sysrq 'g' (always, no process and no filesystem), /dev/dbg (echo a
line, cat the answer), and schdbg. The protocol is lines of text because
the same bytes have to work where nothing can allocate or frame a record,
and because a protocol you cannot drive by hand is one you cannot debug.
struct sbuf moved out of kernel/dev/procfs.c into include/sbuf.h rather
than being written a second time.
Several views exist because of a specific bug. `vma` is the table that
decides whether exit() frees a page, and the DMA ownership bug that made
this worth building was a block that was never in it.
Also fixed, found by building with clang for the first time in a while:
struct iovec was defined in both posix.h and socket.h, and every file that
included both was a redefinition. GCC 15 defaults to C23, which permits an
identical struct redeclaration, so the gcc path never noticed -- while
clang defaults to gnu17 and rejected it, breaking the one toolchain
shell.nix exists to provide and the UEFI loader requires. Both are now
guarded.
D3 (`whose <addr>`, the cross-subsystem ownership query) and D4 (hardware
watchpoints on DR0-DR3) are not built and are described honestly as
missing in the architecture doc's "What it does not do".
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
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.
Nexoniarz