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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infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is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
46 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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name: schunix-schapi-direction
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description: "Schunix is aimed at being a NeXTSTEP/macOS-shaped system with a native SchAPI over a POSIX personality, with permanent Windows-grade compatibility"
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metadata:
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node_type: memory
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type: project
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originSessionId: 9d8a2aef-bcf0-47a0-96c6-f706efab4a95
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modified: 2026-08-07T16:29:50.730Z
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---
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**Agreed 2026-08-06.** Schunix is no longer "a Unix-like kernel with a userland
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attached". It is aimed at being a **system**: NeXTSTEP/macOS-shaped layering,
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with POSIX/Unix kept complete but demoted from identity to *personality*, and a
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native higher-level API called **SchAPI** above it. Written up in
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`docs/plan/schapi.md`.
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The architecture is borrowed from macOS; the compatibility policy is borrowed
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from **Windows** (nothing is ever removed after 1.0). Those are two different
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systems — macOS drops things aggressively — and the mix is deliberate.
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**The load-bearing mechanism:** the stable ABI is a *library*
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(`libschunix`), not the syscall table. That is why macOS can renumber syscalls
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freely while old binaries keep working, and why Linux is stuck with every
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syscall mistake it ever made. Syscalls become private and renumberable; only
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libschunix may issue them. This does **not** contradict
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[[schunix-linux-abi-decision]] — Linux numbering stays as the Linux
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personality's entry path, frozen because Linux froze it, not because we did.
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Everything today is tier `provisional`; the freeze starts at 1.0 and covers
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only what is explicitly marked `stable` then. Committing now would enshrine
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things like the `fcntl(F_SETFL)` no-op fixed in [[schunix-doom-acceptance-test]].
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`compat/` holds **shims written in terms of the current API**, not parallel
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implementations. If an old entry point cannot be expressed as a translation,
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that is a defect in the new API to fix *before* freezing.
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`src-trunk/` is a NetBSD checkout — reference material and a parts bin, never
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built, never in an image. Highest-value pieces: `sys/net`+`sys/netinet` (the
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TCP/IP stack, for the roadmap's Phase 2), `subr_pool.c` (slab allocator), and
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the autoconf driver model. **NetBSD is not uniformly licensed** — a minority of
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files still carry the 4-clause advertising clause and Berkeley's 1999
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rescission only covers UC-copyrighted files. Check every file before copying:
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`grep -l "All advertising materials"`. See [[schunix-licensing]].
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Ordering is unchanged: this is a direction, not a task. The native Windows
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build has to boot first — see [[schunix-build-environment]].
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