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infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is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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105 lines
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# What happens next
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Everything in this directory is **unbuilt**. When a piece of it is finished it
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leaves — deleted from here, rewritten as a description in
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[../architecture/](../architecture/). See [the rule](../README.md#the-rule-that-keeps-this-from-rotting).
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> ## Read [1.0.md](1.0.md) first.
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>
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> It draws a finish line and puts most of the work below on the far side of it.
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> **Anything not named there is not being worked on**, and the documents in this
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> directory describe more than 1.0 contains.
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---
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## The three current decisions
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Taken together, because they turn out to need the same foundation.
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| **[wayland.md](wayland.md)** | The GUI stack becomes Wayland. SchWM and SchDE are deleted; Schcom survives and changes its wire format. |
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| **[hybrid.md](hybrid.md)** | The kernel becomes hybrid — drivers move out into userspace processes, starting with the GPU. |
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| **[init.md](init.md)** | PID 1 stops being a process and becomes a role the kernel guarantees is filled. |
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And the one they all wait on:
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| **[foundations.md](foundations.md)** | Descriptor passing, shared memory, sockets in the filesystem. The critical path. |
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And the one that says which parts of the above are actually being worked on:
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| **[1.0.md](1.0.md)** | The finish line. Four gates, and everything else explicitly deferred. |
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Two longer-horizon documents sit behind these: [schapi.md](schapi.md), the API
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layering and the compatibility promise, and [roadmap.md](roadmap.md), which holds
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everything still open that is not one of the three above.
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---
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## The order
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Set by [1.0.md](1.0.md), which is the authority. In short:
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### 0. Fix what is already wrong — **first**
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Not a document of its own; it is Gate 0 of [1.0.md](1.0.md), assembled from the
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*What it does not do* sections in [../architecture/](../architecture/).
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**Before any new capability**, and the reason is the one that put
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`netdev_selftest()` before the TCP/IP stack: a compositor built on a kernel with
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an unexplained hang and a socket layer that reports success for things it did not
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do will fail in ways indistinguishable from its own bugs.
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### 1. `foundations.md` — the critical path
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Both the Wayland work and the hybrid work stop here. Descriptor passing and
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shared memory are the substrate for handing a buffer to a compositor *and* for
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handing a device to a driver process. **Doing it once for both is the entire
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reason these are one plan rather than three.**
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### 2. `init.md` — before the desktop, not after
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A compositor being brought up for the first time crashes constantly, and
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something that restarts it and says why is worth far more during that work than
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at the end of it.
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### 3. `wayland.md` — with the GPU driver still in the kernel
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W1–W3 and a terminal. W4 and W5 are post-1.0.
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### 4. `hybrid.md` — **after 1.0**
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Deliberately last: **designing a userspace driver interface with no driver
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consuming it produces an interface that is wrong in ways nobody can see.** The
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compositor is the demanding consumer that makes the interface judgeable, so it
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has to exist first.
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---
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## In one sentence
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> Fix what is broken, build the descriptor-passing and shared-memory substrate,
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> make init survivable, put a terminal on the screen — and only then use the
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> compositor as the pressure that shapes the userspace driver interface.
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---
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## What this plan does not address
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Stated here so it is not mistaken for covered:
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- **No IOMMU**, so the hybrid work isolates against bugs and not against a
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hostile driver.
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- **No page cache**, so `foundations.md` delivers a `memfd` and not a general
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answer to shared file mappings. The general answer is still owed.
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- **No dynamic linking**, so no Mesa, no accelerated clients, and no third party
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shipping a `.so` for anything.
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- **A new compatibility surface** between PID 1 and PID 2, created by a plan
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whose own [schapi.md](schapi.md) §3 spends a section warning about those.
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- **The three open networking items** — `getsockname`, routing, and
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interrupt-driven receive — are untouched by any of this and still open. They
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are in [roadmap.md](roadmap.md).
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