| 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infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is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
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| .. | ||
| schcom | ||
| schde | ||
| schfs-linux | ||
| schinst | ||
| schwm | ||
| README.md | ||
projects/
Things that run on SchOS rather than things that are SchOS.
Everything above this directory — kernel/, boot/, lib/, cmd/,
include/ — is the operating system: it boots, it owns the hardware, and it
is one program that either works or does not. Everything in here is an
ordinary program that talks to it through syscalls, exactly as toybox does.
The split exists because the alternative gets bad quickly. A compositor, a window manager and a desktop are each larger than the kernel will be for a long time. Grown inside the OS tree they would blur into it: a compositor would start reaching into kernel headers because they are right there, the build would grow a dependency from the kernel to a GUI, and "does SchOS boot" would stop having a clear answer. Keeping them separate forces the boundary to be a real interface — syscalls and protocols — rather than a shared header nobody meant to share.
Concretely, code in here:
- links against the sysroot's libc, never against kernel headers
- talks to the kernel only through syscalls and
/dev - can be built, run and debugged without rebuilding the kernel
- may be split into its own repository later without untangling anything
What lives here
| Directory | What it is |
|---|---|
schcom/ |
SchOS Compositor. Owns the display, composites clients, routes input. |
schwm/ |
SchOS Window Manager. Window placement, decoration, focus, on top of Schcom. |
schde/ |
SchOS Desktop Environment. Panel, launcher, settings, file manager. |
schinst/ |
The installer, the installation environment, and .sip tooling. |
schfs-linux/ |
SchFS as a filesystem for Linux. FUSE first, a kernel module later. |
schfs-linux/ is written to stand on its own. It does not mention SchOS
anywhere, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight: it is intended to be
the first piece released, and it has to make sense to somebody who has never
heard of the OS it came from — a filesystem is judged as a filesystem. The
connection can be made later, once there is a finished system to connect it to.
Practically, that means anything added there needs its own licence header, its
own README framing, and no cross-references into this tree. It shares the
format with kernel/fs/schfs/, not the prose.
They stack: SchDE needs SchWM needs Schcom needs the kernel. Nothing points the other way, and nothing here is a dependency of the kernel build.
Status
All four are scoped and none is started. What each is waiting on is written
in its own README, and the ordering is in docs/plan/roadmap.md.
The short version: Schcom cannot start until the kernel has unix domain
sockets (for the client protocol and for passing buffer handles) and raw
input events (a /dev/input that bypasses the tty line discipline).
Shared memory and framebuffer mmap are already done.