kernel: a refusal names its rule, and two bounds stop failing open

An AMD Ryzen booted to a working compositor with no USB and no storage,
and the log said only "register refused". A tree-wide audit of every
compile-time ceiling followed: 235 of them, 139 on quantities the machine
or a file decides rather than us, 5 documented anywhere, 171 silent when
reached. docs/fixed-bounds-audit.md has the inventory.

Errno attribution. The errno space was split between the kernel and the
envelope, free to drift; it is now one list in system/abi.zig, restated on
both sides, with a comptime check in library/device/driver where the two
halves are visible. device_register's six refusals and device_claim's three
are distinct codes, so a bus driver can say which rule stopped it, and
BadParent splits into NoSuchParent and NotYourParent. pci-bus reconciles
found against registered instead of counting refused functions as found.

Idempotency ordering. The child cap was checked before the identity match,
so a restarted bus was refused its own devices — the supervision restart the
system leans on ratcheted toward a degraded machine. A re-registration
consumes no slot and is now admitted first.

IOMMU fail-closed. confineDevice returned success for a device id past the
confinement table, leaving the device outside every domain while the caller
believed it confined — unreachable only while ids stop at 64, which both the
inventory move and a hardware-reported domain count would change. It refuses
now, and the coupling to the broker's device cap is a comptime assert rather
than a sentence in a comment.

PCI apertures. The bridge's MMIO apertures are derived from the holes in the
firmware memory map, and the derivation copied sub-4 GiB entries into a
fixed [64] array and skipped the rest. A skipped region is not merely lost:
the gap finder concludes it is free, so a real machine's 60-200 entry map
yields an aperture over live RAM, and containment then admits a child BAR
covering kernel memory. Rewritten to walk the map in place, with the hole
finder extracted as a pure function and driven by a synthetic 100-entry map
in a new test case. Both new tests were verified to fail on the old code.

parameters.zig gains the rationale it was missing and loses a stale sentence
pointing at the wrong file; vdso.md documents the errno space, including
EPEER, which had no written meaning anywhere.

docs/os-development/bounds.md is how a ceiling is declared from here.
docs/bounds-track-plan.md is the plan to remove the ones we invented.

Suite 114 -> 115.
This commit is contained in:
Daniel Samson
2026-08-08 11:09:54 +01:00
parent 7db5fba884
commit a86559648e
25 changed files with 1520 additions and 168 deletions
+8 -2
View File
@@ -4,8 +4,14 @@
//! hiding the trade-offs. Keeping them here makes them visible at a glance and gives
//! one spot to change them. They're plain `comptime` constants (zero runtime cost);
//! any one can later be promoted to a `-D` build option if a target needs to vary it
//! (see build.zig's `-Dtest-case` for the pattern). This keeps ps2-library.zig to what it
//! actually is — the bootloader↔kernel handoff *contract* — with tunables living here.
//! (see build.zig's `-Dtest-case` for the pattern). This keeps [[boot-handoff]] to what
//! it actually is — the loader↔kernel handoff *contract* — with tunables living here.
//!
//! **Kernel only, and deliberately so.** This file exists because tunables were
//! crowding the loader↔kernel contract they were split out of; it is not a registry for
//! the whole system. A driver's ring size belongs to that driver, a protocol's payload
//! cap to that protocol. How a ceiling is *declared*, wherever it lives, is
//! docs/os-development/bounds.md — a shape, not a shared list.
/// Ceiling on logical CPUs the kernel tracks — the size of the per-CPU bookkeeping
/// arrays (discovery pool, scheduler state, per-core GDT/TSS). Generous headroom: