docs: document the supervision hierarchy and driver discovery
drivers.md gains a "How a driver gets started" section — the doc explained what a running driver does but never who starts it. It lays out the three-level supervision hierarchy (kernel spawns init; init spawns the services; the device-manager discovers, matches, and spawns the drivers) and names the two user-space policies that "configure" drivers today: init's service list and the device-manager's match table. driver-model.md's "what exists today" adds system_spawn and the supervision model, and the drivers.md restart bullet is refreshed: a spawning supervisor now exists, a restarting one still doesn't.
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@@ -20,6 +20,49 @@ them for itself:
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A driver is, in one sentence, *a process that sleeps until its device has something to
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say.*
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## How a driver gets started: discover, match, spawn
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Nothing in the kernel decides that the HPET needs the `hpet` driver — that is policy,
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and policy lives in user space. Boot brings user space up as a three-level supervision
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hierarchy, each level owning one job:
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```
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kernel ──spawns──► init (PID 1) ──spawns──► device-manager ──spawns──► hpet
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spawns only init, the service supervisor: the driver supervisor: enumerates
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publishes the starts the system /system/devices, matches each device
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initial-ramdisk services (vfs, the to a driver, and system_spawn's it
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so user space can device-manager). Its
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system_spawn from it list is init policy.
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```
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The kernel launches exactly one process — `init` — and hands it nothing but the raw
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ability to start more (`system_spawn(name)`, which loads a binary bundled in the
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initial-ramdisk as a fresh ring-3 process). Everything else is a user-space decision:
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- **init** ([system/services/init](system/services/init/init.zig)) is the **service
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supervisor**. It spawns the system services danos brings up at boot — today `vfs` and
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the `device-manager` — from a small list. Drivers are deliberately *not* its job.
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- **device-manager** ([system/services/device-manager](system/services/device-manager/device-manager.zig))
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is the **driver supervisor**. It does the three steps a monolithic kernel would do in
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its probe path, entirely from ring 3:
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1. **Discover** — `device_enumerate` snapshots the device table the kernel built from
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ACPI/PCI ([discovery](discovery.md)).
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2. **Match** — for each device it looks up a driver by `DeviceClass`. The match policy
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is a table (`driverFor`): today a static `timer → hpet` map; a fuller system reads
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what each driver *binds* (a manifest under `/system/drivers`, or the driver
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describing its own match).
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3. **Spawn** — `system_spawn(driver_name)` starts the matched driver, which then claims
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its device and runs the event loop below.
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So "how is a driver discovered and configured" has two halves: **discovery** is the
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kernel's device table, read by anyone; **configuration** is two user-space policies —
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init's service list and the device-manager's match table. Both are hardcoded in their
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respective programs today; the natural next step is to move them into `/etc` (see the
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milestone notes in [driver-model.md](driver-model.md)). `system_spawn` is currently
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ungated — any process may spawn any bundled binary — because there is no spawn
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capability yet.
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## The capability: claim before touch
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The driver syscall numbers (`system/abi.zig`) with the device types they carry
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@@ -312,9 +355,12 @@ controller drivers), and the IOMMU — have proposed signatures in
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- **Unregistering children.** `device_register` only appends. A USB device that is
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unplugged cannot be removed, and a bus driver in a loop can exhaust the 64-entry
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table.
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- **Restart.** A driver that dies should release its claim, have its device quiesced,
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and be respawned by a supervisor. Some pieces (`releaseIrqs`, `device_grant`
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teardown, the claim table) exist; the policy doesn't.
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- **Restart.** A supervisor that *spawns* drivers now exists — the device-manager starts
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them with `system_spawn` — but a supervisor that *restarts* them does not. A driver that
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dies should release its claim, have its device quiesced, and be respawned; today nothing
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notices the death. Some pieces (`releaseIrqs`, `device_grant` teardown, the claim table)
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exist, and `dev_release` (below) is the missing mechanism; the restart policy is the
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resilience track ([resilience.md](resilience.md)).
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- **Interrupt priority / threaded IRQ latency.** `notifyFromIsr` enqueues the woken
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driver but doesn't preempt (`wakeLocked` deliberately leaves that to the caller), so
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a woken driver waits for the next scheduling point.
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