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799abbc19a
The BIOS loader drew its own splash and the UEFI loader drew a different
one, which is how two implementations of a single screen end up looking
nothing alike: only one of them ever got a change. stage2main.c's
fourteen drawing functions are deleted and it calls boot/common/ui.c,
which is what the UEFI loader already used. There is one splash now.
What changed in the look, in order of how much it mattered:
- No product name under the mark. The name is *in* the mark, and
setting it again underneath read as a placeholder nobody removed.
- The mark is scaled to the bar's width and sits directly above it, so
the two are one object rather than a large logo with an unrelated
line beneath. Box-filtered down from the source mask, never up:
point-sampling a coverage mask drops half the edge pixels and puts
holes in the thin strokes.
- Metal rather than flat grey. A vertical gradient with a knee near the
top where a highlight falls, applied to the mark, the bar fill and
panel headings. A single colour on a dark ground looks printed; the
knee is what makes it look lit. No texture -- at this size noise
reads as dirt.
- The boot manager is a panel with a lit selected row, replacing a
screen laid out in literals with a magic y of 340 that only ever
looked right at 800x600.
Three defects found by reading pixels rather than code:
- the UEFI loader kept calling print() after the splash, and ConOut on
a graphical firmware renders into the same framebuffer -- a
screenshot showed firmware text across our mark from the left edge.
Diagnostics go to COM1 directly now, which is where they were being
read from anyway, and the console is cleared before drawing so the
firmware has nothing to put back.
- SPLASH_UP was declared and read but never assigned, so that redirect
was dead code and the "serial works" reading was OVMF's own console.
- stage2 overflowed its allocation -- 25440 bytes against 24576 -- and
the build did not stop. The kernel is written at sector
1 + STAGE2_SECTORS, so a stage2 past its allocation is overwritten by
the kernel it is loading. STAGE2_SECTORS is 64 now, and the padding
tool's check does fire; it had simply not been re-run.
Verified from the host on both: BIOS 800x600 and UEFI 1280x800 both draw
a centred group with zero stray pixels, UEFI's spanning x 576-703 which
is exactly the mark width centred. bootcheck 108 [ok], iso builds.
Still text-mode: the resolution menu. On BIOS it necessarily is -- it
runs in real mode before any framebuffer exists, which is the whole
reason it can set one. On UEFI it could be graphical and is not yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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| .claude/memory | ||
| Assets | ||
| boot | ||
| cmd | ||
| docs | ||
| etc | ||
| include | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| ports | ||
| projects | ||
| tools | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| LICENSE.MIT | ||
| Makefile | ||
| NOTICE | ||
| README.md | ||
| 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.