| Filename | Latest commit message | Latest commit date |
|---|---|---|
b08432b2c3
Four complaints, and only one of them was the thing it looked like. **"toybox is too small."** Half true, and the fix cost no licensing at all: 236 of toybox's applets are what defconfig builds, and the rest live in toys/pending/ -- awk, bc, diff, more, expr, tr, hexdump, stty among them. Same 0BSD tarball, switched off by a config default. 26 of them are on now, 236 -> 268. Not everything: strace wants ptrace, syslogd wants BSD's facilitynames[], git wants OpenSSL, and those three break the link. The toybox build also works again on this machine. Its scripts start #!/bin/bash, which does not exist on NixOS, so the binary in the tree was one nobody could reproduce; the shebangs are rewritten to /usr/bin/env bash on the way in. Pending applets are enabled by editing .config directly, because `make oldconfig` is the obvious way and undoes it -- every pending symbol is `default n`. **BusyBox was asked for and is not here.** It is GPL-2.0-only, and `make ramroot` links the root image *into the kernel binary*, so it would put GPLv2 inside an Apache-2.0 executable -- which is the exact case ports/Makefile's NOTPORTS filter and docs/licensing.md §4 exist for. nano is the same answer one version later. Both recorded in licensing.md with what was done instead, since "no" without an alternative is how a rule gets quietly broken later. **An editor that is not vi.** kilo, BSD-2-Clause, one 1300-line file, no dependencies beyond termios and TIOCGWINSZ, both of which zsh already needed. Installed as /bin/edit as well as /bin/kilo, because somebody with a file to fix will type `edit`. **"wget doesn't work."** Not a userland problem, and BusyBox's wget would have failed identically: nothing on this system could turn a name into an address, so every program taking a hostname failed in its own way and each looked like a separate bug. There is still no DNS client in SchOS and there does not need to be -- musl has a complete resolver and it works over ordinary UDP sockets. The one missing fact was which nameserver, which the kernel has had all along from DHCP and never published. /proc/resolv.conf publishes it in resolv.conf's exact syntax; cmd/resolvconf decides whether it becomes /etc/resolv.conf, and will not overwrite a hand-written one without -f. # wget -O - http://example.com/ | head -1 <!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Example Domain</title> **Something to host with.** cmd/httpd: GET and HEAD, static files, index.html for a directory and a listing otherwise, a child per connection. No CGI, no keep-alive, no TLS, no config file. The path check is the only security-relevant code in it and it refuses rather than normalises -- no component may be `..`, and percent-decoding happens first, because %2e%2e is `..` and a check before decoding does not see it. Both forms answer 403. And the disk is 100 MB, from 32. It is sparse, so the image is 21 MB on the host. RAMDISK_BLOCKS went 6000 -> 8000 with it: the ramdisk was at 86% and the next thing added would have broken `make ramroot`, which nobody would have noticed until they used it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2 |
||
| .. | ||
| 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 and the register of everything half-built. Then plan/README.md for the order.
About to start something new → the register, first. Nothing new starts while it has rows in it, and a row leaves only by being finished or deleted.
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. |
| terminals.md | The six virtual terminals, and how one is switched to. |
| networking.md | Drivers, lwIP, sockets — Unix and INET. |
| init.md | schinit, PID 1 as a role, 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, and the freeze. What 1.0 contains, what is deferred, and the register of every half-built thing in the tree. |
| foundations.md | The kernel work everything else is blocked on. |
| 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. |
| schfs.md | The filesystem's own, from the same period as its design. |
| 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.