SchOS/docs/plan/1.0.md

SchOS 1.0

A finish line, so that the list of open work stops being infinite.

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Why this document exists

schapi.md §3 says the stability freeze starts at 1.0 and covers whatever is marked stable at that moment. 1.0 was never defined, which means there has been no finish line — and with no finish line every gap is equally mandatory, the list only grows, and the project feels larger every week regardless of how much gets done.

That feeling is structural, not a judgement about progress. This document fixes the structure by drawing a line and putting most of the open work on the far side of it.

Anything not named in this document is not part of 1.0. It is not cancelled, not forgotten, and not up for reconsideration until 1.0 ships.

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What 1.0 is

A machine one person can sit down at and use for an afternoon without falling off an edge.

Concretely — boots on real hardware, roots on SchFS, runs a shell and the real toybox userland, is on the network, and puts a windowed terminal on the screen.

It is deliberately a small complete system rather than a rich incomplete one. SchOS 1.0 is not Linux, does not run third-party applications, and has no package manager. It is a system that works, end to end, with nothing in it that lies about what it did.

The acceptance test

One unattended run, asserted from the host, the way everything else here is tested. When this passes, it is 1.0:

boot on real hardware from a USB stick
  → SchFS root mounts, generation counter advances
  → schinit starts the compositor
  → a terminal window appears and is asserted by pixel
  → in it: ls, cat, a file written, a network fetch
  → reboot
  → the file is still there and the checksum matches

Nothing in that sentence is a feature list. Every clause is something that is currently either broken, missing, or unproven.

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The freeze, and the register of unfinished work

No new capability is started until this register is empty.

The failure this exists to stop is not laziness and 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 one is left in a corner: present in the tree, not finished, not deleted, and not visible in any list. Enough of those and the tree stops matching its own documentation, which is the state this register was written to end.

Two rules, and they are the same rule seen from either end:

Nothing enters the register except by being finished or being deleted.

Adding a row requires closing one. Two things in flight. Never three.

A row leaves this table in one of exactly two ways. Either it is finished — and finished means a description exists in ../architecture/, not that the code works — or it is deleted, and deleted means gone from the tree, not marked for deletion. A directory that has said "to be deleted" for months is the corner, not the cure; projects/schwm/ and projects/schde/ proved that and are now actually gone.

Built, and not connected to anything

The galling ones. The work exists, is tested, and nothing uses it.

	Where it stopped
The text layer	kernel/dev/text.c and kernel/dev/ttf.c are 850 lines that rasterise TrueType and draw at any pixel position. The console still indexes font_data[256][16]. The only caller is a self-test.
A font from disk	Same layer, same reason. The console's 8×16 CP437 grid is compiled in.
Socket activation	schinitd parses [Socket name] and remembers the path. Nothing holds the socket. This is the entire reason for copying launchd, and it is the half that was not built.
display_ops.wait_vblank	In the vtable, implemented by the VBE driver, left null by virtio-gpu. A compositor that needs it cannot rely on it.

Started, and stopped part-way

	Where it stopped
foundations.md	Item 1 built. Items 2 (a shareable memory object), 3 (AF_UNIX in the filesystem namespace), 4 and 5 open. Wayland stops at item 2.
hybrid.md	Closed. All four mechanisms built; H1, H2 and H3 done. H4 — the USB eviction — is withdrawn rather than outstanding: USB is the bus peripherals arrive on, not a peripheral, and an eviction that has to leave an identical driver behind has moved nothing. See hybrid.md, "Decided: USB stays in the kernel".
ldls.md	L0, L1 and L2 done — the loader handles 2,440 stock modules; 449 of 500 run init_module; and 8139too's probe() runs to completion and returns 0, reached through struct offsets read from the kernel's own BTF. L3 (a packet, and the /dev/pci back end) open. The hardware is still invented.
Schcom v0	715 lines that composite, over a wire format that is superseded. Frozen: it runs, nothing more is added, and it is kept only because it is the one thing in the tree that has ever put a client's pixels on screen.
debugger.md	D0 through D4 built and described in ../architecture/debugging.md. Only the network transport is open — a userspace daemon bridging TCP to /dev/dbg, which is deliberately last.

The row LDLS spends. hybrid.md closed above — H3 built, H4 withdrawn — and ldls.md takes the slot it freed. Worth being honest that this is the largest thing ever to enter this register, and that it is explicitly not part of 1.0: nothing in the acceptance test needs a foreign driver. It is here because the mechanisms it uses are finished and idle, and because the alternative to it is writing a driver for every device that exists.

The row the debugger spent. Adding one requires closing one, and A released PCI device closed when H2 landed. It is worth saying plainly that the debugger is not a capability of the OS the way every other row here is: nothing in it ships to a user or appears in the acceptance test. The case for it is that Gate 0 is a list of bugs to find in a kernel that could not be asked anything — so it is the instrument the rest of this register is surveyed with, and it earns its slot by making every other row cheaper to close.

Closed since this register was written. A released PCI device — release is now symmetric with claim (bus mastering cleared before the DMA is freed, a refusal when the device is the only display), a supervised job starts the replacement, and it is described in ../architecture/devices.md under "Taking it back".

Named in a "what it does not do" and still true

Not corners — these were written down honestly on the day and stayed written down. They are here so the register is the whole picture rather than the flattering part of it.

/proc/<pid>/exe is a regular file	so readlink() fails and ps -o comm prints [init]
getrusage	does not distinguish RUSAGE_CHILDREN from RUSAGE_SELF
No slab allocator	every subsystem's fixed-size table is a consequence
No getsockname/getpeername	and accept() does not report an AF_INET peer
No routing table	first interface wins, which is a rule and not routing
No descriptor garbage collector	a socket passed over itself and never received leaks the pair

Frozen — scoped, unstarted, and not to be started

Neither cancelled nor in progress. Do not open these.

projects/schinst/	the installer, the installation environment, .sip
projects/schfs-linux/	SchFS as a filesystem for Linux
roadmap.md §4	the interactive crash screen
roadmap.md §6	SchFS beyond SchOS
schapi.md	the API layering, designed and not built

Each of those is well argued and none of them is on the path to the acceptance test above. That is the whole test for whether something belongs in this section: not "is it worth doing" but "does 1.0 fail without it".

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The four gates

In order. Do not start a gate before the one before it closes, and closing means a description exists in ../architecture/ — see the rule.

Gate 0 — Fix what is already wrong

This comes first, before any new capability. The desktop work is the temptation and it is the wrong thing to do next: a compositor built on a kernel with an unexplained hang and a socket layer that reports success for things it did not do will fail in ways indistinguishable from its own bugs. That is the same argument that put netdev_selftest() before the TCP/IP stack, and it was right then.

Things that are actively wrong:

• The ls -lR hang. Not reproducible. Instrumented and hunted; see below. Left here rather than deleted because the absence of a result is the result.
• setsockopt returns 0 without setting anything. Six options now genuinely reach lwIP's pcb and everything else is ENOPROTOOPT. Round-trip checks in cmd/socktest, which a permissive stub cannot pass: it has to read back a value it was set and refuse an unknown option.
• accept4 silently drops its flags. It is its own table entry now rather than an alias for accept — an alias would have had to read a fourth argument that accept never passes, inventing a SOCK_NONBLOCK out of whatever the caller last left in that register.
• Timestamps on everything created after boot read 1970. Both know() (SchFS) and now_sec() (v1) returned uptime() under comments saying the kernel had no wall clock. It has had one since time_init() started reading the RTC; the comments outlived the condition. Two errors, not one — uptime() counts 10 ms ticks and they were used as seconds, so the clocks also ran 100× fast.
• getrusage does not distinguish RUSAGE_CHILDREN from RUSAGE_SELF.
• /proc/<pid>/exe is a regular file, not a symlink, so readlink() fails and ps -o comm prints [init]. Needs symlink support in procfs.
• OVMF memory reporting, if the region-list fix did not fully close it.

Work already done and not connected:

These are the galling ones — the replacement exists, is tested, and is unused.

• Port the console onto the text layer and delete the cell grid. text.c and ttf.c both exist and work. The console still indexes font_data[256][16].
• Load a font from disk and point the console at it.
• Interrupt-driven receive. The e1000's handler calls netdev_rx_signal(), which ends the network thread's wait early; the frame is still pulled by the thread, because an interrupt handler can neither sleep on the buffer cache nor take the lwIP lock. The wait stays on the tick so lwIP's timers keep their floor. Proven rather than assumed: /proc/netif gained wake_rx/wake_tick, and across three pings rx_frames and wake_rx both went 2 -> 6.

Structural, because everything after this compounds on it:

• A slab or pool allocator. kalloc hands out one page at a time, and every subsystem written since has invented its own fixed-size table to work around it — NPROC, NSOCK, NDEVICE, NSHM, MAXJOBS. This is the single change that most improves everything else in the kernel, and it gets more expensive with every table added.
• SchFS on-disk format version policy. Done. SCHFS_VERSION for frame changes, plus compat/ro_compat/incompat feature flags in what was reserved0 — so existing images keep every field offset and read unchanged. uber_check() now distinguishes damaged (step over it; that is what the ring is for) from too new (stop), because falling back to an older uberblock mounts a stale filesystem and reports success. Proven on a forged image: the old code mounted the stale root and exited 0. Still owed: an actual upgrade step, which is only writable once there are two formats. See ../architecture/schfs.md.

Found while doing the above, and fixed:

• Every AF_INET socket failed with ENFILE until DHCP bound. inet_new() required an address before it would hand out a socket, and reported the refusal as "file table overflow". Creating a socket is not the same as having somewhere to send; a bind or connect with no route fails on its own with an error that says so. net_is_ready() (lwIP up) is now distinct from net_is_up() (DHCP bound).
• socktest asserted "AF_INET is refused, not faked". True when written, false since AF_INET landed — and green the whole time, because the suite runs before DHCP binds and the ENFILE above made the refusal look real. A test asserting a failure has to say which failure.

The suite itself:

Both of these were found by running make schfs-check rather than by reading it, and both predate the current work — confirmed by stashing and re-running. They are here rather than filed as nice-to-haves because a suite that is red for known reasons stops being read, and then it is red for unknown reasons too.

• make schfs-check fails at baseline. Fixed, and it was not only a test bug. The allocation map was taken through a palloc callback and there was no way to give it back — no schfs_space_release, and a comment in schfs_space_init reading "caller frees what was taken" for an API the caller did not have.

  So the kernel leaked the whole map on **every unmount**, up to 2 MB a
  time, and `schfs_space_init`'s own error path stranded a page it had
  already taken because `npages` was only raised after *both* allocations
  succeeded. The test's 518 leaked pages were the symptom that pointed at
  it.
  
  The map now carries its own `pfree` so it can only be freed by the
  allocator that filled it, `schfs_vol_open`/`schfs_vol_format` release any
  map the volume already holds, and unmount releases. `schfs_objtest`
  asserts the balance — 520 pages taken, 520 given back — so the next leak
  fails the suite instead of being absorbed by it.
  

• 31 UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer errors. Fixed, plus two the test never reached. One root cause: a leaf's value area holds variable-length records packed end to end, so a record begins wherever the last one ended — a multiple of 8 only by luck — and the code read them by casting a pointer into the block, which tells the compiler they are aligned when they are not.

  The seven record types that live at arbitrary offsets now carry
  `SCHFS_PACKED`. **No on-disk layout changed**, and that was measured
  before it was applied rather than assumed: every one already had explicit
  `pad` fields, so sizes and member offsets are identical with and without
  the annotation. Seven `_Static_assert`s now pin those sizes, because a
  record that silently grows misreads every existing volume from that point
  on and looks like corruption rather than like a struct that changed.
  
  `schfs_node_hdr`, `schfs_item`, `schfs_kptr` and `schfs_uberblock` are
  deliberately left alone — the node header is exactly 32 bytes, so
  everything after it is already 8-aligned, and annotating them would cost
  byte-wise access on the tree's hottest paths to fix a problem they do not
  have.
  
  Verified by reading an image written *before* the change: full
  `schfs_fsck --check` passes on structure, checksums, key ordering, data
  blocks and derived free space.
  
  Also caught on the way: `mkschfs` passed a null pointer to `qsort` for an
  empty directory. Every implementation ignores it when the count is zero;
  the standard does not say they have to.
  

The identity item:

• Boot from a USB disk. The xHCI stack, bulk-only transport, SCSI and the block device all work; a superblock reads back through bread(). What is missing is that the root device is compiled in rather than selectable. Without this the acceptance test above cannot run at all.

The ls -lR hang, and why it is closed

Hunted with the instrumentation it asked for, under a workload heavier than the one that originally triggered it — ten iterations of ls -lR /bin, interleaved with writes and cd, 33 execs and 13378 tree descents. Measured across it:

inode_peak       9 / 200        unchanged
file_peak        9 / 512        unchanged
buf_pinned_peak  1 / 256        unchanged
schfs0  locked 0  tx_owner_pid 0  tx_depth 0

Nothing climbed, nothing wedged, and the repaired holdingsleep assertion never fired. That eliminates this file's own stated hypothesis — "a lock or reference-count leak somewhere in the *at() paths" — and it is very likely the bug was fixed in passing by the *at() dirfd rewrite, the getdents cookie rewrite, or SchFS becoming the root, all of which landed after it was reported.

It is closed rather than chased further, and that is a deliberate application of the two-things-in-flight rule. The instrumentation is permanent: if it ever happens again, /proc/fsstat names the table, or shows locked 1 with tx_owner_pid 0 and the volume lock is orphaned. That is a much better position than the one it was reported from.

Two real defects were found on the way and fixed, neither proven to be the cause: holdingsleep() never compared the owning pid, which disarmed all seven panic() assertions built on it; and SchFS's tx_mine() compared a bare struct proc *, which a recycled ptable slot makes ambiguous.

Gate 1 — The foundations

foundations.md, items 1–4. Descriptor passing, a shareable memory object, AF_UNIX in the filesystem namespace.

Nothing above needs these; everything below stops without them.

• Item 1 — sendmsg/recvmsg with SCM_RIGHTS. Built and tested; fourteen checks in cmd/socktest, each moving data through the passed descriptor rather than inspecting it. Described in ../architecture/networking.md. This was also mechanism 1 of hybrid.md — one primitive for both, which is the whole reason those are one plan.
• Item 2 — a shareable memory object (memfd_create, and mmap(MAP_SHARED) on it genuinely working between two processes). This is what a Wayland buffer still cannot cross on.
• Item 3 — AF_UNIX sockets in the filesystem namespace.

Gate 2 — Init as a role — done

Milestones I0–I3, all built. PID 1 forks a supervisor and spawns jobs on its behalf; the job table lives in /proc/schinit; a heartbeat runs both ways; and proc_reincarnate() re-execs PID 1 in place rather than panicking. Both failure paths are exercised by sysrq keys rather than reasoned about.

Before the desktop rather than after, because a compositor being brought up for the first time crashes constantly, and something that restarts it and says why is worth far more during that work than at the end of it.

The description is now ../architecture/init.md; the plan document it replaced has been deleted, per the rule.

Gate 3 — The desktop

wayland.md, W1–W3, and the terminal.

W4 and W5 are not in 1.0. Multi-window focus policy and a panel are post-1.0. One terminal window that works is the bar.

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Not in 1.0

The point of this list is that it is written down, so it can stop occupying attention. Nothing here is cancelled.

	Why it waits
The rest of the hybrid kernel (hybrid.md)	Still not a completeness requirement — but the mechanisms and the first eviction happened early, because the alternative to a driver compatibility layer is writing a driver for every device that exists, and that is not a plan. What is deferred is the foreign driver host, not the interface it needs.
Dynamic linking, Mesa, SDL3	Everything at 1.0 is statically linked. This is the single biggest post-1.0 unlock and it is a whole project.
A page cache	memfd covers the desktop's needs. General writable MAP_SHARED of a file is a real project with no 1.0 consumer.
.sip and the installer	1.0 installs by writing a USB stick. That is how most systems start and it is honest.
SchFS snapshots, FUSE, Linux module, sparse files, online fsck	The format version (Gate 0) is the prerequisite for all of them, and it is the only part on a clock.
The interactive crash screen	PSOGM renders, prints a full report and emits a QR code. That is enough.
CFF/OTF fonts, kerning, text layout	TrueType and fixed advances are enough for a terminal.
Routing, getsockname/getpeername, IPv6	One interface, one default route, works.
Multiple outputs, damage tracking, subsurfaces, xkbcommon	One screen, full repaints, one keymap.
Audio	Does not exist in any form and is not required to use a machine.
Panel, notifications, settings, file manager	A terminal is a desktop.
SchAPI itself	Deliberately. It should be designed from the compositor's experience, not before it.

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The rule for this list

Adding to Gate 0–3 requires deleting something else from it.

Not a productivity trick — a forcing function. The reason this project feels overwhelming is that ~20 fronts have been open simultaneously, and no amount of discipline makes that workable. The fix is structural.

And one working limit, worth holding to literally:

Two things in flight. Never three.

One in Gate 0 and one being written up. Everything else is closed — in the document, and out of your head.

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How you will know it is going well

Not by velocity. By this:

Every closed item leaves a description behind. When the ls -lR hang is fixed, history/kernel.md gains an entry saying what it actually was. When the console moves onto the text layer, architecture/graphics.md loses a line from its What it does not do section.

Those "does not do" sections shrinking is the real progress bar, and it is the only one that does not lie.

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A note worth keeping

This document was written because the work started to feel overwhelming, and that is worth recording rather than tidying away — because the feeling was about the shape of the work and not its quality, and the two are easy to confuse when you are inside it.

The evidence at the time: SMP working on real hardware after five bugs stacked behind each other; a copy-on-write filesystem whose crash test cuts the power one write later, 119 times, and demands a clean mount after each; a TCP/IP stack asserted from both ends; an xHCI driver written from the specification; and a documentation tree that records why things are strange so they do not get un-fixed by accident.

None of that is the output of a project in trouble. It was a project with too many tabs open.