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infinite, and marks schwm/ and schde/ superseded: in Wayland the compositor is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