SchOS/docs/history
Repository files (latest commit first)
Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
Nexoniarz fe32833ade display: a 64-bit framebuffer address, no mirroring onto itself
Three fixes for real machines that broke at any resolution but 800x600:

- kmain() took the loader's framebuffer address as uint32, and
  vga_fb_init() re-published the scanout from that and the 16-bit VBE
  block. An aperture above 4 GB moved the console onto the wrong memory
  right after the vga: line. Both now use the loader's 64-bit display
  block, mapped with ioremap().
- The loader mirrored onto the console splitter's GOP, which forwards to
  the primary itself, and onto GOPs that share the primary's aperture.
  After a mode change that rewrote the screen over itself with another
  mode's stride. Handles without a device path and overlapping apertures
  are skipped, and a mode change re-matches the remaining mirrors.
- A mode whose reported size, stride or aperture does not add up after
  SetMode is refused, and the loader returns to the previous one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
2026-10-23 15:46:42 +02:00
..
kernel.md display: a 64-bit framebuffer address, no mirroring onto itself 2026-10-23 15:46:42 +02:00
moving-to-linux.md licence: SchOS is GPL-2.0-or-later, no longer Apache-2.0 2026-10-22 08:48:45 +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
schfs.md include: one folder per subsystem, and includes that name it 2026-10-23 15:05:12 +02:00

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 log is 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.