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>
The TCP/IP stack reached straight into the first driver anyone wrote.
net.c called e1000_present(), the lwIP glue was named netif_e1000.c and
called e1000_transmit(), and include/defs.h declared the driver's
internals to the whole kernel. The second NIC driver would therefore
have arrived with a near-identical copy of the glue file and a patch to
the protocol stack, which is the arrangement include/device.h was
written to prevent -- the e1000 even said so, with `.ops = 0, // no
class vtable yet; there is no net class`.
There is now. A driver publishes a struct netdev_ops -- transmit,
receive, mac, link_up -- and is finished: it never mentions lwIP, and
nothing above it learns its name. The display class was already this
shape; this is the same shape for networking, and the two now read the
same way in kernel/dev/device.c.
What that made possible immediately:
- One netif per bound device instead of one per driver. lwIP's glue is
netif_eth.c, it takes a struct device, and it holds up to NETIF_MAX
interfaces. net.c attaches every network device it finds and starts
DHCP on each, because which interface the network answers on is not
ours to decide.
- /proc/netif lists all of them, one block of fields each, with the
interface name and the driver that claimed it.
- The ARP self-test moved from the e1000 to the class. Nothing in it
was chip-specific, and it is the first thing anyone will want to run
against the next driver. Still `echo n > /proc/sysrq`.
- Private headers live with their driver: e1000.h was in include/,
where exactly one file could use it. The driver build now adds the
driver's own directory to the include path.
The e1000 also drives more than one card. Its probe() refused the second
outright, because there was a single static instance -- so a machine
with two of them drove one and silently ignored the other. Instances are
an array now, and the instance is hung on dev->priv by a new optional
`attached` hook that the bus calls once the device exists. probe() runs
before device_add(), so there was previously nowhere to put it; that is
the whole reason the hook exists rather than a line inside probe.
QEMU gets an explicit NIC on every target (QEMU_NET). The default device
happens to be an e1000 on this machine type today, which is exactly the
sort of thing that stays true until a QEMU release changes it and the
network stops being exercised without anyone noticing.
Verified:
- bootcheck -Net passes, 48 [ok], no failures -- including the moved
self-test and two new checks that /proc/netif names both the
interface and the driver behind it, which together say the stack
went through the class rather than through a driver it was compiled
to know.
- Two NICs attached by hand (-device e1000 twice, second with its own
MAC): eth0 and eth1 both attach, each reports its own MAC in
/proc/netif, and each gets its own DHCP lease. Before this commit
the same machine produced one interface.
- make schfs-check still passes in full.
One trap worth recording: moving a header broke the build for anyone
with stale .d files -- make stopped with "No rule to make target
'include/e1000.h'". CFLAGS gains -MP, which emits a phony target per
header so a moved or deleted one can never wedge the build again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 2's entry for the TCP/IP stack was edited in place when lwIP
landed, and the edit left the old decision text behind as an unchecked
box -- so the list carried an open item that was really a paragraph of
reasoning about a choice already made. The reasoning is worth keeping,
because it is the argument against writing TCP by hand later as much as
it was the argument then; it is no longer pretending to be a task.
What is recorded now: AF_INET's two debts are paid, bootcheck -Net
verifies the whole thing without anyone typing, and the two things that
remain are named -- accept() not reporting a peer address, and receive
still being polled on the timer tick rather than woken by the e1000's
interrupt. That last one is the honest limit on latency today, and
writing it down beats rediscovering it with a stopwatch.
Also: the e1000 path had not been updated for the drivers/ split.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
lwIP 2.2.0, fetched by ports/lwip and compiled straight into the kernel.
Not written from scratch, and the reason is not the packet formats: it is
congestion control, retransmission, window management and twenty years of
corner cases that only show up against a real peer. Not FreeBSD's
netinet either, though the licence would have allowed it -- that stack is
not a library, it reaches into mbufs, epoch(9), netisr, VNET and uma(9),
so adopting it means porting FreeBSD's kernel infrastructure first. lwIP
was written for exactly this situation: a small kernel with a raw
Ethernet driver and a port layer of a few hundred lines.
It is kernel code, so nothing is installed into the sysroot and there is
no second build system: the top-level Makefile compiles the files it
wants against our port headers. The file list is explicit rather than a
wildcard, because lwIP ships IPv6, 6LoWPAN, PPP, SLIP, DNS-SD and a dozen
apps in the same tree, and building what is not configured yields either
dead code or a link error naming a port function nobody meant to write.
Its sources are unmodified and its warnings are silenced for its files
only -- patching them would mean maintaining a fork.
The port layer is ours: a lock, a clock, the netif that hands frames to
e1000, lwipopts.h, and a shim/ directory of tiny headers so lwIP's
<string.h> and friends resolve to the kernel's functions instead of the
host's, whose prototypes disagree and would otherwise be found on the
default include path.
NO_SYS=1, so lwIP has no threads of its own and one kernel thread feeds
it. A thread rather than the interrupt handler, because a call into lwIP
can reach the driver, the driver can sleep, and an interrupt handler
cannot -- so the interrupt still only clears the cause register and the
thread polls. kthread_create is new and generally useful: a process with
a kernel-only page directory, no files, no cwd, no parent, dispatched
from forkret, which can therefore sleep and be preempted like anything
else. DHCP obtains an address at boot and the console says which one.
AF_INET went in exactly where phase 2 said it would. socknew dispatches
on the domain, kernel/net/inet.c implements the internet side on lwIP's
raw API, and not one syscall changed shape: bind, connect, listen,
accept, read and write reach the same descriptors they always did. TCP
and UDP both work. cmd/nettest opens a connection, writes, and reads the
answer back.
Two things are owed and named here so they are not discovered later:
recvfrom does not yet report the source address, and the socket paths
poll on the timer tick instead of sleeping on the socket. Both are
follow-ups, not redesigns.
NOTICE carries lwIP's BSD-3 text. Clause 3 is no-endorsement, not the
old advertising clause, so it sits with Apache-2.0 without difficulty.
Verified: the tree builds clean, and the headless boot check passes with
27 [ok] and no failures with the stack compiled in and the thread
running -- which is the part that would break first if netinit deadlocked
or the thread starved anything. An end-to-end connection test belongs in
that suite and is the next commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The last three phases of the filesystem, which were written together and
touch the same files throughout -- kmount.c, objw.c and vfs.c are each
rewritten by all three -- so they land as one commit rather than three
that could not be built separately.
Durability. A transaction that reaches the platter out of order is worse
than one that never reached it: the uberblock can name a tree whose
blocks are still in the drive's write cache. bdirty/bflush give the
buffer layer an explicit barrier, ideflush issues ATA FLUSH CACHE and
usb_storage_flush the SCSI SYNCHRONIZE CACHE that means the same thing,
and a commit now waits for the data before it writes the root that
points at it. The uberblock groups are read newest-first with fallback,
so a volume whose newest roots are torn mounts at an older one and says
which generations were lost.
Reflink. Extents carry a refcount, so two objects can name the same
blocks and neither frees them while the other holds them. Exposed as
FICLONE -- Linux's ioctl value, so `cp --reflink` works unmodified --
and as cmd/reflink for the case where there is no cp to hand.
Attributes, and the one genuinely new idea here. attr.c stores named
values on an object, reachable through setxattr/getxattr/removexattr at
Linux's syscall numbers. On top of that, schfs_index declares an index
over an attribute name and schfs_query answers "which objects carry this
value" from the B-tree rather than by walking. A query against an
unindexed attribute is refused with an error, never silently answered by
a full scan: a query that quietly becomes a scan is worse than one that
admits it cannot help. cmd/schattr drives both.
Three bugs fixed on the way, each found by the numbers being wrong
rather than by inspection:
- statfs's f_fsid was declared int64[2]. Linux's fsid_t is two *ints*,
so every field after it landed one slot late: userland read f_frsize
out of f_namelen, got 255, and df reported a 32 MB root filesystem
as 1992 KB. It hid for as long as it did because the fields used to
be invented constants, so wrong numbers looked like the usual ones.
- struct inode's nlink was a short against SchFS's uint32, so a file
past 32767 names came back negative -- and iput frees an object
whose count reaches zero. It is an int now, signed on purpose, so an
underflow lands somewhere a check can see rather than wrapping.
- filewrite split every write to fit v1's log. That limit belongs to
the journal, not to writing, and SchFS makes one transaction of
whatever it is handed: a 1 MB write was becoming 170 commits and
170 flushes for nothing. fs_ops carries max_write now, and SchFS
sets no limit.
Also here: a real mount table, so `mount -t schfs /dev/hdb /mnt` shows
up in /proc/mounts -- df looks a path up there before it calls statfs at
all, so a mount missing from that list was invisible to it -- several
volumes mounted at once, snapshots mounted by name, and /proc/fsstat
with an rdtsc-based counter, which is the only instrument fine enough to
see inside a single syscall.
Verified: `make schfs-check` passes in full, including the sweep that
crashes the volume at each of 119 points mid-transaction and requires
every one to mount with exactly its committed data, and the case where
both newest uberblocks are rubbish and the volume still comes back. The
headless boot check passes with 27 [ok] and no failures, on a SchFS root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1449 lines of boot/bios/, tools/sign.pl and tools/padstage2.pl, plus the
build rules, the disk image and the ISO entry that existed to carry them.
Everything since roughly 2012 boots UEFI, and CSM -- the firmware-side
BIOS emulation that lets a legacy loader run on such a machine at all --
has been going away since Intel dropped support for it in 2020. So this
is not a path being retired early; it is one whose remaining hardware is
already the exception.
The cost was never the code, it was the tax on everything near it. Stage
2 had a 65-sector ceiling it overflowed silently -- 25440 bytes against
24576 -- and because the kernel is written at sector 1 + STAGE2_SECTORS,
an overflowing loader was overwritten by the very kernel it was loading.
The resolution list could not be shared with UEFI either: VBE mode
setting is INT 10h, so matching it needed unreal mode, which is the
riskiest code in the tree for a feature that already worked elsewhere.
What replaces schos.img is the staged ESP, handed to QEMU as a virtual
FAT volume. That is a development arrangement and not an installable
disk; a real GPT image with a real FAT partition is the installer's job,
and until it exists nothing here writes a disk a machine boots unaided.
Secure Boot is untouched too -- the loader is unsigned.
The ISO keeps one El Torito entry, the FAT image holding loader and
kernel. It never booted from a USB stick via BIOS anyway: the firmware
presents the stick as a hard disk while stage2main.c read the kernel back
over ATAPI.
The 32-bit multiboot entry in entry.S now has no caller and is left in
place. Deleting kernel entry code is its own change with its own way of
failing silently, and it should not ride along with this one.
Ported with it: run.ps1, the six screenshot tools, and schcom_test.sh,
each with its own OVMF varstore copy so no run inherits another's UEFI
variables.
Two things this shook out. OVMF now belongs in `all`: nothing boots
without firmware, `make clean` wipes build/ including the copy fetched
from the host, and a clean followed by a build left every run script
throwing. And it cannot be listed as a prerequisite at the top of the
file -- make expands prerequisites when it reads the line, and
$(OVMF_CODE) is defined further down, so naming it there appends nothing
and says nothing.
Verified from a clean tree: 110 [ok] and no failures on the full suite,
the ISO boots with no hard disk attached, schfs-check passes, schcom's
end-to-end pixel test passes, and fbshot captures a real 1280x800 frame.
README's layout predated the BIOS/UEFI split. moving-to-linux.md now
says what is gitignored and therefore absent from a clone: dist/ holds
61 MB of upstream tarballs, so copy it or let the build re-fetch them --
make ports verifies each against a known SHA-256 either way.
tools/posix/setup-fedora.sh installs the toolchain and reports what it
cannot: PowerShell has no Fedora package, and bootcheck is the test
suite, so the script says how to get pwsh rather than failing quietly.
It also checks /dev/kvm, since a Ryzen box can run the tests at native
speed.
docs/moving-to-linux.md is the actual procedure: copy the repo, restore
the memory, install, build. The memory travels inside the repo and
`memory-sync.sh import` puts it under the key this machine derives from
its own path -- /home/nexoniarz/Documents/SchOS becomes
-home-nexoniarz-Documents-SchOS, where D:\DEV\SchOS was D--DEV-SchOS.
OVMF discovery no longer assumes QEMU's Windows layout. Fedora ships
edk2-ovmf to /usr/share/edk2/ovmf/, Debian and Arch differ again, so the
Makefile searches a list and names the packages when it finds nothing.
Tested through the shell rather than $(wildcard): on Windows make is a
native binary using Win32 file calls, while `command -v` returns an MSYS
path like /c/Users/..., which $(wildcard) cannot see -- it returned
nothing on a machine that had the firmware.
Two things only that machine can test: `make ports` builds musl, toybox
and mksh from source, which Windows cannot do at all; and the SchFS
round-trip needs symlinks and hard links, so it has never actually run.
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.
tools/windows/ .ps1 (pwsh, so usable from Linux and macOS too)
tools/posix/ .sh
tools/python/ .py
tools/ .c and .pl
The .c and .pl files stay at the top level because they are not
host-specific: the build compiles or invokes them on every platform.
Call sites updated in the Makefile, ports/mk/port.mk, docs and the
project memory. The one thing that does not survive a move on its own is
a script deriving the repo root from its own location -- all nine
PowerShell tools used Split-Path $PSScriptRoot -Parent, and memory-sync.sh
used dirname/.., both of which quietly become tools/ one level deeper.
Two levels now.
Two pre-existing Windows failures surfaced while verifying, both real and
neither caused by the move:
- schfs_fsck.c did not compile under mingw at all: --extract uses
POSIX mkdir(path,mode), symlink() and link(), none of which mingw
has. That took the whole tool with it, and `make schfs-check` with
it. mkdir maps to _mkdir; symlink and link fail loudly rather than
writing a regular file in their place, because an extracted tree
that differs from the image while reporting success defeats the
point of --extract.
- the round-trip test then failed at `ln -s`, since Git Bash cannot
create symlinks without developer mode. It skips with a message now.
Not a fudge: mkschfs's mingw build cannot see a symlink either, so
the test would have compared a tree with none against an image with
none and called it a pass -- coverage reporting itself as present
while being absent.
Verified on Windows: build clean, all seven bootcheck suites green,
make schfs-check passes.
Prerequisites per platform, why the toolchain is clang rather than a
cross-gcc, how to force GNU, and the host differences already handled --
listed because they are the shape of the next such bug.
Records the two things a second machine needs to know: ports cannot be
built on a Windows host (sysroot/ is used as staged, so build them once
on a Unix), and pwsh runs on Linux and macOS so the bootcheck suite is
not Windows-only.
Removes the "-unix" element and with it any trademark exposure to The
Open Group.
The split follows the ecosystem layout: SchOS is the system, and the
kernel has its own name. Kernel-identity strings are the only places
that take SchIFT -- uname(2) sysname, /proc/version, and the two licence
sentences that say "kernel" outright. That is what every Unix does here:
`uname -s` on Linux reports the kernel, not the distribution. Everything
a user reads as the product -- panic screen, boot menu, error prefixes,
docs, LICENSE, NOTICE -- is SchOS.
schunix.img is schos.img, the logo assets and the musl TLS patch are
renamed, and __SCHUNIX__ is __SCHOS__ (the define and the patch that
consumes it moved together).
Two things the rename broke, both found by the bootcheck suite:
- shmtest wrote "SCHUNIX-MMAP-OK" with a hardcoded length of 15 and
compared it back by hand-counted offsets (m[3]=='U', m[14]=='K').
The shorter marker left the write running two bytes past the literal
and the compare reading past the data, failing a file-backed mmap
that was working correctly. Now written and compared through one
constant with sizeof.
- bootcheck asserted a 31-byte file after appending to
"hello-from-schunix"; the shorter string makes it 29.
Both are the same mistake: a string literal whose length is written out
somewhere else. Full suite green -- base, Tty, Ps, Sock, Fb, Usb, Evdev.
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.
