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The screenshot was mode 16. OVMF advertises it as 1366 wide; asking for it produces a framebuffer QEMU scans out at 1360, so every row written lands six pixels further along than the one above and the whole screen shears. The firmware never says it rounded, and nothing in the mode information hints at it -- PixelsPerScanLine agrees with the width it claims. So a mode is only usable if its width is a multiple of 8, which is the VGA scanout granularity. Checked rather than assumed: 1400x1050 and 1280x720 render perfectly centred, 1366x768 does not, and it is the only advertised width that is not a multiple of 8. The single cycling row is now a list. Every usable mode the firmware offers, deduplicated -- it advertises the same geometry several times with different internals, and a menu with 1280x1024 in it three times is one nobody trusts -- plus a row for typing a size. A typed size is matched against the same filtered list, so a mode that would shear cannot be reached by typing it either, and a size that does not exist says so rather than silently keeping the old one. Also fixes the panel layout you spotted: the title band was exactly as tall as the heading, so the rule was drawn through the lettering and the first row sat on its baseline; and the selected row's highlight had a fixed 3px offset against a 24px row, so it sat on the text rather than around it. Verified by applying four resolutions from the list -- 1280x800, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1600x1200 -- and checking the panel is centred in each. bootcheck 108 [ok]. BIOS still asks in a text prompt before the framebuffer exists, and that is the remaining half of "the same for both". See the next commit message or the note in stage2.S: VBE is INT 10h, so it needs real mode, and a graphical chooser needs either unreal mode before the switch or a return to real mode after it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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| run.ps1 | ||
A 64-bit operating system, written from the metal up.
SMP · copy-on-write filesystem · 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.
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 + bootloader + root filesystem -> schos.img
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/building.md for prerequisites per platform, and docs/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/ bios/ (MBR, stage 2, VBE splash) uefi/ (PE loader)
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, roadmap, licensing, building
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 TCP/IP. The decision is made — port lwIP rather than write one — but it is not done. The e1000 driver works; nothing speaks to it yet.
- No compositor, window manager or desktop. That is the next large piece.
- 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.