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The network thread waited on the timer and nothing else, so a frame that landed just after a poll sat in the ring for up to 10 ms -- the largest fixed latency in the system. That was deliberate when the stack was new (a receive path woken by an interrupt is much harder to debug than one that is asked) and there is now a working stack to compare against, which is exactly when it becomes safe to do. The frame is still *pulled* by the thread through .receive. It has to be: a call into lwIP can reach the driver, the driver can sleep on the buffer cache, and an interrupt handler may do neither. netdev_rx_signal() delivers nothing and reads no ring -- it only ends the wait early. The wait stays on the timer tick rather than moving to a channel of its own, and that is the design. lwIP's timers must still run when the link is silent, so the clock has to remain a floor under the wait, and sleep() cannot wait on two things at once. Joining the tick's existing wakeup costs nothing and leaves one wait with one predicate. rx_signal lives under tickslock for the same reason it gets no lock of its own: sleep() releases tickslock atomically, so a driver setting the flag and waking under that lock cannot lose the wakeup by arriving between the predicate test and the sleep. A private lock would not be held across the sleep, and that window would be back. Calling it from interrupt context is safe on the same terms the timer handler already relies on -- acquire() disables interrupts, so a CPU holding tickslock cannot be interrupted into it. The e1000 signals on RXT0 (a frame or burst has landed) and RXDMT0 (the ring has fallen below its threshold, which is when waiting for the clock hurts most). Measured rather than asserted: /proc/netif reports wake_rx and wake_tick, and across three pings rx_frames and wake_rx both went 2 -> 6 -- every received frame woke the thread through the interrupt. wake_tick keeps advancing as the idle floor, which is what lwIP's timers need. socktest still passes and ping is still 0% loss. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2 |
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| architecture | ||
| guides | ||
| history | ||
| plan | ||
| 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 one rule that belongs to no category and applies to everything: licensing.md — read it before copying anyone else's code in.
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. |
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.