/dev/tty1..tty6, Alt+F1..F6 or `chvt N`. Each is an independent terminal --
its own screen, cursor, line discipline, foreground process group and
session. Two shells on two terminals are unrelated processes that share a
keyboard and a screen.
What made it possible is a backing store. The console drew straight into the
framebuffer and scrolled by moving pixels, which works exactly as long as
nothing else wants the screen: there was nowhere to put terminal 2 while
terminal 1 was visible, and nothing to repaint terminal 1 from. Each terminal
owns a grid of cells now and the framebuffer shows whichever grid is active,
so vt_switch() is set-index, repaint, return -- nothing is saved on the way
out because the outgoing grid has been current all along.
The rule the layer is built on: a terminal does not know whether it is
visible. Writes land in the grid, the cursor moves, the grid scrolls, all
unconditionally; drawing is one question asked at the bottom of vt.c. Every
alternative spreads "am I on screen" through the escape parser, and then a
terminal switched away from mid-sequence comes back wrong.
Everything that was a single global is per-terminal now: tty_fg_pgrp (deleted),
termios, the input ring, the escape parser, the UTF-8 decoder, and the cursor
-- which also stops being pixels in gfx.c and becomes cells in the terminal.
TIOCSCTTY was `return 0` and now records proc->ctty, which is what /dev/tty
resolves through; /dev/tty was an alias for /dev/console with the same minor,
and they are different questions.
kbd.c names Alt+F1..F6 as KEY_ALT_F1+n, above 0xFF on purpose -- every byte
value is already a character or a UTF-8 continuation, and a chord colliding
with one would be typed into the terminal instead of switching away from it.
What the chord means is decided in console.c, where the terminals are.
VT_ACTIVATE / VT_WAITACTIVE / VT_GETSTATE / VT_OPENQRY, Linux's numbers.
The argument to ACTIVATE is by value, not a pointer -- same shape as TCFLSH.
Two bugs found by screenshotting the result rather than reading the log:
- zsh emits 0x0F to leave alt-charset mode, because that is what the `linux`
terminfo says rmacs is, and the console drew CP437 glyph 0x0F: a sun, in
the prompt, on every line. A terminal never draws a C0 control character.
- SGR 7 was unimplemented, so zsh's partial-line marker rendered as a bare
'#' instead of a reversed block. Reverse video swaps the colours at draw
time, not at store time, so turning it off restores what was underneath.
Verified by screendump: tty1 and tty2 show different screens, and switching
back repaints tty1's earlier content from its grid. schfs-check passes.
docs/architecture/terminals.md, including what it does not do -- no
scrollback, no reflow, no VT_PROCESS mode for a display server to veto a
switch, which Schcom will need before it owns Alt+F7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
struct file already carried a uint64 offset and bread already took a
uint64 block number. The narrowing was one boundary in the middle:
devsw's read and write took a 32-bit uint, so fileread passed a 64-bit
f->off into a 32-bit parameter and the top half was discarded.
The effect was not a refusal at 4 GB but silent wraparound past it. A
read at 5 GB returned the bytes at 1 GB, reporting success. disk.c had a
DISK_MAX_BYTES constant documenting the limit, and nothing anywhere
referenced it -- the cap was described but never enforced, which is the
worst of the three options.
The signature is now uint64 across all nine files that carry it, and
diskread/diskwrite no longer narrow the block number on the way to
bread. Widening this is a prerequisite for NVMe and for any real disk:
namespaces start well above 4 GB and the failure mode reads valid data
from the wrong place.
Verified end to end rather than by inspection. A 6 GB sparse image with
"PAST4GB-MARKER-OK" written at byte 5368709120, attached as /dev/hdb to a
ramdisk-root kernel so device 1 was free:
# dd if=/dev/hdb bs=4096 skip=1310720 count=1 | od -c | head -2
0000000 P A S T 4 G B - M A R K E R - O
Under the old code that offset truncates to 1 GB, where the image is
zeroes. The whole path is exercised: f->off, devsw, diskread, bread and
ide.c's LBA48.
Worth recording for next time: `make ramroot` stages the ESP itself, and
running `make esp` afterwards rebuilds the kernel without RAMROOT and
silently undoes it. The tell is a 855 KB kernel where a 25 MB one is
expected.
110 [ok], no failures, on the default build.
Nothing outside the kernel could touch a disk. sys_mount does not even
look at the device it is handed -- it mounts the one SchFS volume found
at boot and ignores `source` -- so a program had no way to read a
partition table, format a volume or write a boot sector. An installer is
a program that needs all three, so this is the first piece of it.
A character device in devsw rather than a separate block layer, because
that is where the offset already lives: fileread/filewrite pass f->off
and advance it by what comes back, which is everything a seekable device
needs. The minor is the IDE device number, the same numbering iderw()
uses; two schemes for the same disks would be a bug waiting to happen.
Writes bypass every filesystem above them, which is inherent to a raw
device and why an installer must target a disk it has not mounted.
The nodes are created unconditionally, like every other entry in /dev.
That matters more than it looks: with no node, `echo x > /dev/hdb`
silently creates an ordinary file of that name and appears to work. It
did, and it agreed with itself on read-back; only the host's copy of the
disk showed nothing had been written.
st_rdev was never filled, so every node in /dev reported "0, 0" under
ls -l. Harmless while nothing read it, wrong as soon as something has to
tell two disks apart. Filled with the full Linux dev_t encoding rather
than (major << 8 | minor), which only works while both stay small.
Verified against the host as an independent oracle, both directions: the
guest wrote to /dev/hdb and the host saw those bytes at offset 0; the
host wrote at offset 4096 and the guest read them back with dd skip=.
ls -l now shows 1,1 for console, 2,0 for fb0 and 8,1 for hdb.
Known limit, commented in disk.c: devsw passes the offset as a 32-bit
uint, so a raw disk is addressable to 4 GB. That must be widened before
anyone installs onto a real disk.
bootcheck 108 [ok] with -Fb -Tty -Usb -Sock -Evdev -Ps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.
