| Filename | Latest commit message | Latest commit date |
|---|---|---|
57aff40228
docs/ was ten files where a plan, a description, a guide and a bug report all
sat next to each other. It is now architecture/ (what SchOS is), plan/ (what it
will be), guides/ (how to work on it) and history/ (why it is like this), with
an index that states the one rule holding it together: when something is
finished it moves from plan/ to architecture/ and is rewritten as a description
of the thing rather than a record of building it.
A ticked checkbox says the work happened. It does not say what the work
*produced*, and six months later the checkbox is all that is left. The network
stack proved the point: finished, verified end to end, and for a month the only
description of it anywhere was a checkbox four levels of indentation deep.
So roadmap.md went from 534 lines to 181 -- nothing deleted, the done work
graduated. Seven subsystems that were finished and undescribed now have
descriptions: boot, kernel, syscalls, filesystem, networking, graphics, usb,
init. Every one ends with "What it does not do", which is the section that pays;
a document listing only strengths is marketing, and the reader who needs it most
is the one about to trip over a limitation nobody wrote down.
schfs.md still opened with "phases 1 through 3 1/2 are done, phase 4 is next"
long after all five had landed. It is a description now, with the phase record
and the hard-won bugs moved to history/.
Three corrections found on the way, all load-bearing:
* projects/schcom/README.md claimed SCM_RIGHTS was done. There is no
sendmsg/recvmsg in the kernel at all, and an entire GUI plan rested on it.
* The root README said "No TCP/IP" months after the stack landed.
* history/kernel.md sec.7 was marked "in progress" on a problem that process
groups solved.
Also adds plan/1.0.md, which draws a finish line so the open list stops being
infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is
the window manager, so that split dissolves rather than being abandoned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
|
||
| .. | ||
| kernel.md | ||
| moving-to-linux.md | ||
| README.md | ||
| schfs.md | ||
History
Why SchOS is the way it is. Bugs whose cause was nowhere near their symptom, and the few write-ups that have nowhere better to live.
| kernel.md | The expensive ones. Boot, SMP, signals, ABI assumptions, /proc, input. |
| schfs.md | How the filesystem was built, and what each phase cost. |
| moving-to-linux.md | The Windows-to-Fedora move. |
What belongs in here
A bug whose cause is not visible from the code that fixed it.
That is the whole test. If reading the fix explains the problem, the fix is the documentation and nothing needs writing down. If the fix looks arbitrary — a constant moved by eight, a field reordered, a check inverted — then the strangeness is load-bearing and the next person to touch it deserves to know why before they change it back.
Every entry here is a thing that looked like a different problem than it was.
What does not belong
- A changelog.
git logis the changelog. - A bug that was found and fixed in an hour. Cost is the filter.
- How something works. That is ../architecture/, written in the present tense for somebody who does not care what it used to be.
- Anything still open. An unfinished investigation goes in ../plan/ or in the code as a comment. This directory is past tense.
How to write one
Symptom first, then diagnosis, then the fix, then the transferable part.
The transferable part is the reason the entry exists. __thread being wrong for
per-CPU data is worth more than the specific null dereference it caused;
"a layout constant that several artifacts must agree on wants a check that stops
the build, not a comment asking people to remember" is worth more than the
bootloader offset that taught it.
Say how it was found, when the technique was the hard part. A hardware
watchpoint through QEMU's gdb stub named an instruction on the first run after
three rounds of cprintf had narrowed it to nothing — that is reusable, and the
bug is not.
Do not clean up the embarrassing part. The near-miss where a change passed
every assertion green without having been applied at all is one of the most
useful entries in this directory, and it only works because it admits that a
grep returning three hits was read as confirmation without counting what they
were.