A 64-bit operating system written from the metal up: SMP kernel, copy-on-write filesystem, Linux syscall ABI, Alpine packages, X11 on real hardware.
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Repository files (latest commit first)
Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
Nexoniarz 3eed58fe9b kernel: holdingsleep asks who holds the lock, not whether anyone does
int r = lk->locked;                              // before
    int r = lk->locked && lk->pid == myproc()->pid;  // after

Seven callers, and every one of them is an assertion of the form

    if (!holdingsleep(&b->lock)) panic("brelse");

whose entire purpose is to catch a process releasing a lock it never took.
Answering the weaker question disarms all of them: iunlock() on an inode locked
by another process, and brelse() on somebody else's buffer, both sailed through
and unlocked it underneath the real holder. Two processes then believe they hold
the same inode, and the corruption surfaces somewhere else entirely -- which is
exactly the shape of bug these panics exist to prevent.

Found while hunting the ls -lR hang. It is not proven to be that hang's cause,
and the instrumentation in the next commits says it is probably not. It is a
real defect regardless, and it re-arms the detector that would catch the rest.

myproc() is null on the boot path before the scheduler runs and acquiresleep()
stores 0 for that case, so this compares the same way rather than dereferencing
null. Checked that nothing touches a buffer that early, so the stricter
assertion cannot fire spuriously on boot.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-12 17:13:59 +02:00
.claude/memory docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
Assets Rename Schunix to SchOS; the kernel becomes SchIFT 2026-08-09 14:09:59 +02:00
boot boot: the disc that could not be chainloaded, and the error nobody could see 2026-08-11 11:54:47 +02:00
cmd net: recvfrom says who sent it, and a datagram is delivered whole 2026-08-15 16:23:06 +02:00
docs docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
etc schinit: the console job stops explaining itself in launchd's words 2026-08-15 15:59:29 +02:00
include docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
kernel kernel: holdingsleep asks who holds the lock, not whether anyone does 2026-09-12 17:13:59 +02:00
lib schfs: the commit barrier, reflink, and attributes with an index over them 2026-08-15 16:02:02 +02:00
ports net: a TCP/IP stack, and AF_INET on the sockets that were already there 2026-08-15 16:02:48 +02:00
projects docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
tools net: a network *class*, so the stack stops knowing what an e1000 is 2026-08-15 16:42:34 +02:00
.gitattributes Initial commit: Schunix as it stands before the SchOS rename 2026-08-09 13:47:01 +02:00
.gitignore Drop a committed Emacs lock file, and ignore them 2026-08-09 14:41:51 +02:00
LICENSE Rename Schunix to SchOS; the kernel becomes SchIFT 2026-08-09 14:09:59 +02:00
LICENSE.MIT Rename Schunix to SchOS; the kernel becomes SchIFT 2026-08-09 14:09:59 +02:00
Makefile gfx: the console and the crash screen stop drawing on a driver by name 2026-08-15 17:04:10 +02:00
NOTICE net: a TCP/IP stack, and AF_INET on the sockets that were already there 2026-08-15 16:02:48 +02:00
README.md docs: four directories, and a rule for when a thing leaves the roadmap 2026-09-12 17:13:35 +02:00
run.ps1 boot/uefi: the system information panel, and the offset that faked a version 2026-08-11 10:52:43 +02:00

SchOS

A 64-bit operating system, written from the metal up.

SMP · copy-on-write filesystem · TCP/IP · PCI, USB and virtio drivers · TrueType text · Linux syscall ABI


SchOS began as xv6 and is now mostly something else. The scheduler, the memory manager and the trap path have been rewritten for x86-64 and for more than one processor; the filesystem has been replaced outright; the syscall table speaks Linux numbering so that real software — musl, toybox, mksh — runs unmodified.

It is a hobby system built by one person, and it is honest about that: what works below has been run, not inferred, and the gaps are listed as plainly as the features.

The pieces

Layer Name What it is
System SchOS The distribution — kernel, userland, tooling
Kernel SchIFT Multi-core x86-64 kernel with a modular VFS
Filesystem SchFS Transactional, copy-on-write, the root filesystem
API SchAPI System programming interface — the stable surface
Compositor SchCom Display compositor (planned)
Window manager SchWM (planned)
Desktop SchDE (planned)

uname -s reports SchIFT, the way every Unix reports its kernel rather than its distribution.

What works

Kernel — Long mode, 4-level paging, preemptive multitasking. SMP: one, two and four processors all boot, with CPU enumeration from the ACPI MADT rather than the 1994 MP table. Memory sized from the E820 map, so it runs in tens of megabytes rather than demanding hundreds.

Filesystem — SchFS is the root: a copy-on-write B-tree with a uberblock ring, so a crash leaves either the old tree or the new one and there is nothing to repair. Free space is derived from the tree rather than stored beside it, which removes a whole class of disagreement. /proc/schfs shows the generation counter advancing as writes commit.

Processes — fork, exec, wait, pipes, signals, sessions and process groups, mmap (anonymous and file-backed), POSIX shared memory, Unix domain sockets, poll.

Devices — PCI enumeration with a bus-agnostic device model at /proc/devices. Drivers for e1000 networking, virtio-gpu and stdvga displays, xHCI USB with HID, hub and mass-storage class drivers, IDE, PS/2, serial. /dev/fb0 speaks the Linux fbdev interface.

Networking — ARP, IPv4, ICMP, UDP, TCP and DHCP, on lwIP behind a driver-agnostic interface class. Verified end to end from the host, both directions, rather than by inspection.

Userland — musl, toybox and mksh, built from source. ls, cat, ps, top, wc, cp, mount and the rest behave the way you expect, because they are the real programs.

Text — a TrueType rasteriser (glyf outlines, composite glyphs, cmap format 4) replacing the 8×16 cell grid. JetBrains Mono for the terminal, Roboto for the desktop layer to come.

When it dies — PSOGM, the Purple Screen of Guru Meditation: stop code, fault address, call chain, and a QR code containing a text copy of the whole report.

Quick start

make          # kernel + UEFI loader + root filesystem
make qemu     # build it and boot it
make iso      # a bootable ISO for VMware or real hardware

Builds on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD and Windows (Git Bash). The toolchain is clang + lld everywhere — it is a cross-compiler by construction, so one LLVM install targets the bare-metal kernel, the 16-bit boot code and musl userland from any host. See docs/guides/building.md for prerequisites per platform, and docs/history/moving-to-linux.md for moving a checkout between machines.

Testing

Booting to a prompt proves nothing: a filesystem can mount and still fail the first real command, and that has happened here. So the test harness drives the serial console and asserts on what comes back.

tools/windows/bootcheck.ps1            # boot, run real commands, check the answers
tools/windows/bootcheck.ps1 -Tty -Ps   # terminal behaviour, process enumeration
make schfs-check                       # SchFS B-tree, object and image suites

bootcheck is PowerShell because pwsh runs on every supported host.

Layout

kernel/     arch/ core/ dev/ drivers/ fs/ net/ proc/ sys/
  fs/schfs/     the filesystem -- same source the host tools compile
include/    kernel and userland headers
boot/       uefi/ (PE loader)  common/ (shared loader UI)
lib/ cmd/   first-party userland runtime and programs
ports/      third-party software built from source
tools/      windows/ (.ps1)  posix/ (.sh)  python/ (.py)  and .c/.pl
docs/       architecture/ (what it is)  plan/ (what's next)
            guides/ (how to work on it)  history/ (why it's like this)

docs/README.md is the index. If you are reading the tree for the first time, docs/architecture/README.md is the system layer by layer.

One rule worth knowing: the kernel and the host tools compile the same SchFS source. mkschfs cannot disagree with the kernel about the on-disk format, because there is only one implementation — found and fixed on the host, where a test takes a second instead of a boot.

Another: syscalls are declared in exactly one place, kernel/sys/table.inc. Everything else is generated from it.

Not there yet

  • No desktop. Schcom composites and routes input; the plan is now to put it on Wayland and delete the homegrown protocol. See docs/plan/wayland.md.
  • No descriptor passing. No sendmsg/recvmsg, so no SCM_RIGHTS — which is what the GUI work stops at. docs/plan/foundations.md.
  • No dynamic linking. exec handles static ET_EXEC only.
  • No page cache, so writable MAP_SHARED of a file is refused rather than faked.
  • A USB disk cannot be booted from — the root device is compiled in rather than selectable.
  • SchFS has no Linux driver yet; the plan is on-disk format version first, then FUSE, then a kernel module.
  • CFF/OpenType outlines and TrueType hinting are deliberately out of scope.

Licensing

Apache-2.0, copyright Nexoniarz. See LICENSE.

The kernel derives from xv6, which is MIT — see LICENSE.MIT. Third-party code redistributed in a built image (musl, toybox, mksh, the fonts) keeps its own licence; NOTICE carries the attributions.

Drivers may be adapted from BSD sources, which are compatible. Linux drivers are not: GPL-2.0-only and Apache-2.0 cannot be combined and redistributed. Reading Linux to understand hardware is fine; translating a driver is not. Best of all is the public specification — xHCI, virtio, AHCI, e1000 — which carries no licence on what you write from it.


Built with stubbornness and a serial console.