| Filename | Latest commit message | Latest commit date |
|---|---|---|
14f0e4d0e2
Porting zsh found four defects in the kernel and one in the filesystem. None of them were about zsh; all of them had been there the whole time. **exec threw the environment away.** kernel/fs/exec.c wrote a single zero for envp with the comment "(no environment)" -- not yet, but ever, for every process. musl has been passing a perfectly good envp to execve (Linux 59, which SchOS answers) and it was never read. So $TERM was unset, $PATH was whatever each program invented, and a variable exported in a shell did not survive the exec meant to carry it. exec() takes an envp, sys_exec reads argument three, and schinit manifests grew an Environment key. The userland two-argument exec(path, argv) stays as a wrapper that passes null explicitly -- the raw stub is execve now, so a short caller cannot leave %rdx holding a stray pointer. **Which overflowed the kernel stack.** Three pointer arrays, ~1.8 KB, on a 4096-byte stack, under exec -> loaduvm -> readi -> SchFS -> btree. Pid 1 went down on the first exec. The canary caught it and named the process, which is what it is for. They live in one kalloc'd page now. **waitpid returned a bare -1** for both "no children" and "interrupted". musl reads [-4095,-1] as -errno, so userspace saw EPERM; zsh printed "wait failed: operation not permitted" and abandoned the rest of /etc/zsh/zshrc. -ECHILD and -EINTR now. Third time a bare -1 has cost real time -- on a system with no permission model, EPERM should be read as "a syscall returned -1". **NVMA was 64.** musl's allocator takes a mapping per size class and does not release them eagerly, so compinit ran out of slots and got -1, which is EPERM, which malloc turns into NULL, which zsh reports as "fatal error: out of memory" -- on a machine with 1000 MB free. 256 slots, and -ENOMEM. **And a small write to SchFS costs 58 ms.** 200 writes to one open file take 11.75 s; the same to /dev/null take 0.14 s. That is the design stated at the top of kmount.c -- one transaction group per operation, and a commit is two flushes and an uberblock -- not a bug. But compdump writes its digest with thousands of separate prints, so it takes minutes and looks like a hang. compinit -D, which skips the dump, finishes in 3.6 s. This one is a decision rather than a fix, so it is written up and left: /etc/zsh/zshrc keeps compinit switched off and explains exactly why, with the measurements. zsh runs as /bin/zsh and is the console shell. ZLE works -- arrow keys recall history through terminfo, $COLUMNS reads the real 160 because TIOCGWINSZ was fixed, colour and prompt expansion work, startup is 0.14 s. mksh keeps /bin/sh, so schinit's no-jobs fallback is a different program from the one that could have failed. Also fixed while here: AT_CLKTCK was the literal 100 and is USER_HZ; the extract rule in four ports could move a source tree inside itself when make re-ran it, which is how zsh's configure came to write modfile=zsh-5.9/... into config.modules and fail three steps later. schfs-check passes. Full writeup in docs/history/kernel.md section 14. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2 |
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| .. | ||
| architecture | ||
| branding | ||
| guides | ||
| history | ||
| plan | ||
| Website | ||
| licensing.md | ||
| README.md | ||
SchOS documentation
Four kinds of document, kept in four directories, because they answer four different questions and go stale at four different rates.
| architecture/ | What SchOS is | Present tense. Describes what is built and working. |
| plan/ | What SchOS will be | Future tense. Everything here is unbuilt. |
| guides/ | How to work on it | Imperative. Build it, test it, add to it. |
| history/ | Why it is the way it is | Past tense. Bugs whose cause is not visible from the fix. |
Plus two that belong to no category and apply to everything: licensing.md — read it before copying anyone else's code in — and branding/, which holds the marks and the rules for using them.
The rule that keeps this from rotting
When something is finished, it moves from
plan/toarchitecture/and is rewritten as a description of the thing rather than a record of building it.
A completed item is not a ticked checkbox. A ticked checkbox says the work happened; it does not say what the work produced, and six months later the checkbox is the only thing left and it explains nothing.
So finishing a piece of work has three steps, and the third is not optional:
- The code works and is tested.
- The plan entry is deleted.
- A description exists in
architecture/written for somebody who was not there — what it does, what shape it has, what it costs, and what it still does not do.
This is not bookkeeping. The tree has already proved it necessary: the network stack was finished, verified end to end, and for a month afterwards the only description of it anywhere was a checkbox in a roadmap, four levels of indentation deep, written in the past tense of somebody arguing for the work rather than explaining the result.
The "what it does not do" section is the one that pays. Every description in
architecture/ ends with one. A document that only lists a subsystem's
strengths is marketing, and the reader who most needs the document is the one
about to trip over a limitation nobody wrote down.
Start here
New to the tree → architecture/README.md, the system layer by layer, then guides/layout.md for where the files are.
Trying to build it → guides/building.md.
Wondering what happens next → plan/1.0.md, which is the finish line, then plan/README.md for the order.
Something is broken and it feels familiar → history/. There is a good chance it is in there.
architecture/ — what SchOS is
| README | The system, layer by layer. Read first. |
| boot.md | Firmware to the first userspace process. |
| kernel.md | SchIFT: memory, processes, scheduling, traps, signals, SMP. |
| syscalls.md | The call table, and the Linux personality that lets real software run. |
| filesystem.md | The VFS, the buffer cache, procfs, mounts. |
| schfs.md | SchFS: the copy-on-write root filesystem. |
| devices.md | The device model, driver binding, the class vtables. |
| usb.md | xHCI, the USB core, and the class drivers. |
| graphics.md | Framebuffer, text rendering, console, and the crash screen. |
| networking.md | Drivers, lwIP, sockets — Unix and INET. |
| init.md | schinit, PID 1, and the job manifests. |
plan/ — what SchOS will be
| README | The three current decisions and the order they happen in. |
| 1.0.md | The finish line. What 1.0 contains, and what is explicitly deferred past it. |
| foundations.md | The kernel work everything else is blocked on. |
| init.md | PID 1 becomes a role rather than a process. |
| wayland.md | The GUI stack, and what gets deleted to make room. |
| hybrid.md | Moving drivers out of the kernel. |
| schapi.md | The long-term API layering, and the compatibility promise. |
| roadmap.md | Everything else still open. |
guides/ — how to work on it
| building.md | Prerequisites and the build, per host. |
| testing.md | The harnesses, and what each one actually proves. |
| layout.md | Repository map, and how to add a program or a port. |
| adding-a-driver.md | Writing one, binding it, publishing its class vtable. |
branding/ — the marks
| README | Shift the logo, Guru the icon, SchCotie the mascot: what each is for, the colour rule, and why a raster is committed next to its SVG. |
history/ — why it is the way it is
| README | What belongs in here and what does not. |
| kernel.md | Bugs whose cause was nowhere near their symptom. |
| moving-to-linux.md | The Windows-to-Fedora move, kept for the parts that recur. |
Writing one of these
Four conventions, all of them observable in the existing files:
State the cost. Every design choice gave something up. A document that does not say what is a document that will be argued with later by somebody who only sees the downside.
Prefer the measured number to the remembered one. "500 of 3565 files carry the advertising clause" is worth more than "some do", and it was worth the minute it took to count.
Write down the bug that shaped it. Half the non-obvious code in this tree is non-obvious because something failed once. If a design is strange, the strangeness is load-bearing and the reader deserves to know why before changing it.
No dates in headings. A date in a heading turns a description into a
changelog, and the description is the thing with a long life. Dates belong in
history/, where they mean something.