A device nobody holds can be claimed by anyone, so the manager now takes
every firmware-discovered device that carries mappable resources, whether or
not a driver wants it. The real gap was the HPET: an MMIO window, an IRQ, no
user-space driver, and there for the taking. Held by the manager it is
inert; unheld it was a way into physical memory.
Two deliberate exclusions. The loader's framebuffer, which the compositor
claims and which the manager must not take because it starts first. And
anything with no resources, which grants nothing worth holding.
Scope is the boot snapshot. A device reported later and matched to no driver
stays claimable — pci-cap-test and iommu-fault-test both reach an unmatched
NIC that way, so narrowing it is a separate change with those fixtures in
scope. Recorded in the plan rather than left implied.
The attacker fixture gains the assertion deferred since D2: after the system
settles, nothing with resources may be taken.
That assertion defeated itself twice before it worked, and both failures are
worth remembering. First it swept at 0.029 while the manager did not bind
its protocol until 0.047, so it reported a hole that closed a millisecond
later. The retry loop that "fixed" that was worse: the first pass TAKES the
device, so the second finds it unavailable because this process now holds
it, and concludes all is well — it passed with the manager's claiming
removed entirely. It now settles once and sweeps once, and fails when the
claiming is removed.
Suite 118/118.
The rule as planned: a device that was given to someone may be handed on,
never taken. Implemented, and honest about what it is worth.
Writing the test showed the plan had the wrong step doing the work. A
delegated device is HELD, so an attempt to take it is refused as
AlreadyClaimed before the giver is ever consulted; and once a borrower's
death returns the device to its lender — or clears both when the lender is
gone — there is no state where a device is unheld and still on loan. The
window a stranger could have used stops existing at E2. This check is
unreachable.
It stays anyway: one comparison, failing closed, guarding any future path
that frees a device without clearing its giver, which is exactly the hole
this run closed. The comment says it is unreachable rather than implying a
protection it does not provide.
The attacker fixture does not gain the assertion that was deferred to this
step, and its header records why: there is no refusal for it to observe, and
on a bare boot with no device manager nothing is delegated at all, so the
assertion had nothing to bite on. It failed loudly on its first run rather
than passing quietly, which is the only reason this was noticed.
It also leaves the loader's framebuffer alone without naming it: nobody
delegates the framebuffer, so it has no giver, so the display service claims
it exactly as before.
Suite 118/118.
When a driver dies, a device it was *given* now goes back to whoever lent
it, rather than to nobody. The device manager gets its hardware back the
instant a driver dies and hands it to the replacement, with no window in
between.
That window was real: the kernel released the claim to no one and the
manager re-claimed first-come, so every driver restart reopened the hole
this run is closing. It also becomes load-bearing at the next step — once
claim refuses a device that has a giver, releasing to nobody would strand a
dead driver's hardware permanently, because nobody could ever take it again.
A dead lender is no lender: the claim and the giver clear together, so a
device is never owed to a ghost. A device nobody lent is released outright,
exactly as before.
The broker cannot see the task table, so liveness arrives through the same
hook idiom the scheduler already uses. Null means assume dead, so a kernel
built without the hook frees claims rather than handing them to a ghost.
A stale binary nearly passed as proof for the third time this session: the
first discrimination patch left `alive` unused, the build failed with three
errors, and the old binary reported every assertion passing. Checking the
build before reading results is what caught it.
Suite 118/118.
One field, and the rest of the run follows from it. A device that was given
to someone is delegated hardware: it may be handed on, never taken, and when
its holder dies it goes back to whoever lent it instead of becoming free for
anyone to grab.
It also settles the framebuffer without mentioning it. Nobody delegates the
loader's framebuffer, so it has no giver, so the display service claims it
exactly as it always has — no exemption and no reference to display anywhere
in the rule.
No behaviour changes here; the field is recorded and read by nothing yet.
The test found a real bug on its first run, before the discrimination check.
The sentinel for "nobody gave this" was 0 — and task 0 is a real task, the
kernel's own, so a device given away by task 0 read back as belonging to
nobody. Both giver and registrar are optionals now. The second was a latent
bug from D9: the per-registrar allowance would have miscounted every device
task 0 registered.
Suite 118/118.
The last claimant. The kernel seeds the acpi-tables node, so it sits in the
same boot snapshot the manager already scans to find the PCI host bridge —
there was never a bootstrap problem, only a lookup nobody had written. The
manager claims it and names it in the spawn; the service stops claiming.
Every driver in the system now receives its hardware rather than taking it.
Two failures on the way, both mine. addDriver puts the device id in argv[1],
and the acpi service read argv[1] as a self-verify device-count floor — so
handed device 7 it decided it was in test mode, printed "acpi-parse: ok",
and never reported a device. The test argument is now floor:N, which a bare
id cannot be mistaken for.
And acpi-parse spawns the service directly rather than through the manager,
so nothing handed it the node. That test now claims and transfers it exactly
as the manager does, which is the right shape: the test plays the manager's
role instead of the service reaching for hardware.
device_claim now has two callers left: the manager, which is the acquirer
and should have it, and the display service's GOP path. That is recorded as
question 10 — the framebuffer is not a device, so the answer is likely that
it leaves the device table rather than being exempted from its rules.
Suite 118/118.
The second invented ceiling. It was written to stop a driver looping
device_register and exhausting a shared table — but there is no shared table
to exhaust any more, and each registrar already has its own allowance, so a
runaway costs only itself.
It never bounded a determined caller in the first place: 16 children per
parent, and nothing stopped it claiming more parents. What it reliably did
was refuse a real PCI bus with more than 16 functions, which is how an AMD
Ryzen booted with a working display, no USB and no storage.
The constant, its check, and the now-unused childCount all go. TooManyChildren
survives with one meaning instead of two: the caller is at its per-registrar
allowance.
This was unblocked from the moment D9 landed. The plan said so — "once the
quota exists the per-parent cap is redundant whether or not D6 has landed" —
in the same edit that left the step tagged "blocked on D6". Three iterations
were then spent re-reading that tag instead of the sentence beside it.
The containment test now asserts 64 children under one parent, four times
the old ceiling; restoring the cap fails it.
Suite 118/118.
reassign was added at D4 to fix a regression and has been proven only
indirectly since — three IOMMU+USB cases going green. That covered the
visible symptom (a driver's DMA rings unbound) and neither of the latent
ones: the confinement still naming the giver, so the giver's death would
tear down a domain a live driver was using, and the receiver's death would
leave one behind. Those are now asserted.
confinementOwner exposes the record's owner so the suite can see it. The
sequence is the delegation in miniature: unconfined, confine as this task,
reassign to another, confirm the new holder owns it and the old one does
not, then kill the new holder and confirm the domain goes with it.
Two attempts at this test could not have failed. The first found no PCI
function to confine — pciAddressOf needs a pci_device entry and this case
runs no pci-bus — so every assertion skipped silently while the case stayed
green. It now synthesizes a function the way pci-bus does, a 4 KiB config
window inside the bridge's ECAM, and asserts that precondition explicitly so
a skip is a failure.
Verified to discriminate: making reassign a no-op flips three assertions,
including the domain surviving its holder's death.
Suite 118/118.
Delegation moves out of onHello and into the spawn itself. The manager holds
the hardware and names it in the call that creates the driver; the kernel
checks the device is the caller's to give, then hands it over as part of
making the child.
The reason is the window. A transfer after spawning always leaves an
interval in which the child is running and does not yet hold its device. It
would close on QEMU every time and open occasionally on a machine with
different core counts and timing — the exact failure shape this track exists
to delete, and not one worth introducing while removing the others. Fused
into the spawn there is no interval: the child does not exist until it holds
the device.
Ownership is checked BEFORE the child is created, so a refusal leaves
nothing running rather than a driver without the hardware it was spawned
for. The IOMMU confinement moves with the device, as it does on the transfer
path. systemCall6 is added for the sixth argument; r9 was free, and abi
gains a no_device sentinel matching the protocol's.
No driver had to change to receive a device, which is what makes this
better than requiring every driver to hello: ps2-bus keeps its legacy
status, and discovery — which has no assignment at all, since it is what
produces the device tree — is unaffected.
The attacker fixture now tries the spawn as a back door: name someone else's
device, and both the spawn and any child must be refused. Verifying that
assertion exposed a bug in the fixture itself. The kernel case's pass marker
was "device-authority: ok", which matches the FIRST per-assertion line, so
its wait loop exited before any failure was printed — the case would have
passed with failures in it, and had been able to since D2. The verdict lines
now carry a distinct VERDICT prefix, and with the ownership check removed
the case genuinely fails. A green test that cannot go red is worse than no
test.
Suite 118/118.
maximum_devices = 64 is gone. It was a guess about someone else's computer,
and because it was shared, one driver's enumeration starved every other —
which is how an AMD Ryzen booted with a working display, no USB and no
storage. The table now grows from the kernel heap. It was always built after
heap.init; nothing ever prevented this except it having been written static
first.
What replaces it is an allowance charged to the registrar, so a driver
looping device_register exhausts its own and every other driver carries on.
It is declared as what it is — a runaway detector, NOT a security boundary.
A quota generous enough never to bite a real machine is still generous
enough to be unpleasant, and it is not trying to be the defence; delegation
is. What this catches is a legitimate driver in a loop, early, attributably,
and without collateral. Reaching 4096 is a bug report, not a tuning request.
The initial block is 8, deliberately small. Sizing it for a typical machine
would mean the growth path never ran on the hardware we test on and only
woke up on someone else's larger machine — the exact failure shape this
track exists to stop. At 8 it grows several times every boot; disabling
growth now fails the suite with the HPET not fitting, which is the Ryzen
failure in miniature.
The comptime coupling assert added earlier fired, and was right to. confined
(one slot per device id) and domains (the IOMMU's own translation pool) were
sized by the same constant only because device ids happened to stop at 64
too. Two unrelated quantities: confined now grows with the device table,
while maximum_domains stays as the hardware's number — both VT-d and AMD-Vi
report how many domains they support, and reading it is phase 4. The assert
existed for exactly this and did its job.
Suite 118/118.
The first driver to stop claiming its own hardware. The device manager holds
the controller and transfers it in the hello reply, so its matching becomes
authoritative instead of advisory — until now the driver claimed the id it
found in argv[1], and any process could have claimed the same integer first.
The manager claims before it spawns, so there is no window in which anything
else could take the device, and transfers in onHello using invocation.sender
— the kernel-stamped task id, which cannot be forged by the caller. hello is
synchronous, so the transfer has completed before the reply lands: no gap
between being told yes and holding the thing.
usb-xhci-bus's hello moves from after controller bring-up to before anything
that needs the device, which is the bring-up reorder the design predicted.
It is the first member of an explicit delegated set, so every unconverted
driver keeps claiming exactly as before and the suite stays green; the set
and device_claim both go at D6. D3 and D4 could not be separated and the
plan records why: the moment the manager claims, any driver still calling
device_claim is refused, and D3 applied to nothing changes no behaviour and
cannot be tested.
This step introduced a regression and the incremental conversion is what
caught it. confineDevice runs inside systemDeviceClaim, so a device arriving
by transfer was never confined for its new owner. Three IOMMU+USB cases
failed on the driver's DMA rings going unbound, and two worse consequences
were latent: a manager death would have torn down a domain a live driver was
using, and a driver death would have leaked one. iommu.reassign now moves
the confinement with the device, keeping the domain and its attachment
intact so it never translates through nothing. Converting all five drivers
at once would have produced the same three failures with five suspects.
A log line of mine claimed "holding controller device N" before anything
verified it — it printed even in the failure case, where the driver held
nothing. Reworded to state only what is known there: where the registers
are.
usb-hid asserts the delegation with the device id backreferenced, so the id
delegated and the id the driver ends up with must match. Emptying the
delegated set fails it with "hello acknowledged" then "mmio_map failed".
usb-hub failed once in a full run and has passed six times since (four
isolated, two full) — recorded in the plan as a suspected instance of the
known intermittent AP fault, not dismissed, since this step did shift boot
timing.
Suite 118/118.
The audit's sharpest finding was structural, not a bug: a fully green suite
had hidden six real defects because it contains no attacker. Every device
case asserts that a driver handed its own hardware can drive it. None asked
what a process handed NOTHING can do.
device-authority-test is that process. It is spawned with no device and
asserts what it therefore cannot do: it cannot give away a device another
task holds, nor a free one, because the kernel's rule is that you may give
away what you hold and the device's state is irrelevant to a process holding
nothing. Asserted across every device the machine actually has, so it cannot
pass by accident of which one happened to be free at boot — six on QEMU,
none of them its.
A positive control runs first. device_enumerate works from this process, so
the refusals below it are decisions rather than a syscall path that is
simply broken here; without it, "everything failed" would read identically
to "the assertions are meaningless". A nonexistent device is refused as
NoSuchDevice rather than NotHeld, because a refusal that cannot name its own
rule is what cost a debugging session on the Ryzen.
What it deliberately does not assert, and says so in its header:
device_claim is still first-come-first-served at this point in the run. That
is the hole D6 closes, and the claim half of the invariant joins this
fixture then. Asserting it now would be writing a test that documents the
bug.
Verified to discriminate: removing the holder check flips "every transfer by
a non-holder is refused" while the positive control keeps passing.
Suite 117 -> 118.
The mechanism behind delegation, which device-manager.md named as the step
after hello: the device manager claims what discovery seeded and hands each
device to the driver it matched, so assignment stops being
first-come-first-served.
It is a MOVE, not a copy. A claim is exclusive (driver-model.md, invariant
1), so the giver stops holding the device the instant the receiver starts.
That is why this is a new syscall rather than the M13 capability path, where
a passed handle is shared refcounted — exclusivity cannot be expressed that
way.
The kernel's whole rule is that you may give away what you hold. It has no
notion of which task is the device manager and deliberately gains none: a
binary name inside the kernel is not something that cannot safely live in
user space. A recipient that does not exist is refused, because a device
moved to nobody would be unreachable for the rest of the boot — nothing
un-holds a device but task death.
Three errnos, each naming its own rule: ENODEV no such device, EPERM you do
not hold it, ESRCH no such recipient.
Nothing uses it yet. The five claimants move across one at a time in D4-D5,
so the suite stays green throughout and a regression names the driver that
caused it.
Ten assertions, verified to discriminate: removing the ownership check flips
four of them, including the giveaway that an illegal transfer then blocks
the legitimate claim behind it.
Suite 116 -> 117.
The convention that tunables live in system/parameters.zig with their
reasoning attached predates this and got 2% compliance — 5 of 235. A
convention with no teeth is how a bare `const maximum_devices = 64` reached
an AMD desktop and cost it USB and storage. This is the same rule with a
gate behind it.
tools/check-bounds.py finds every bound-shaped declaration — a `maximum_*`
const with a literal value, or a type with a literal array length — and
requires the five-field block above it: what it counts, who decides its
size, what it protects, what happens at the limit, and how anyone finds out.
The at-limit vocabulary is closed: refuse, degrade, truncate, grow. There is
deliberately no way to spell "silent", no way to spell "drop", and nothing
meaning "allow", so the behaviours that did the damage cannot be written
down. Truncation is legal only carrying a marker the reader can see, which
is why klog_maximum_message qualifies and a USB descriptor cut at 512 bytes
does not.
An array length that names a declared bound is not itself a bound; only
literal lengths are flagged, which pushes ceilings toward having names.
The 273 that predate the rule are allowlisted so this lands without a
tree-wide sweep in front of it, and that list may only shrink: declaring a
bound means deleting its line, and the check fails on a stale entry too.
Nothing may be added.
Wired into `zig build test` and available alone as `zig build bounds`. Not
in the default build — it reads the whole tree, and a red bounds check
should not stop you booting a kernel.
Five are now declared rather than allowlisted. Writing them out is its own
argument: maximum_devices reads "protects: nothing — this is a sizing guess
about someone else's computer", and maximum_tasks now carries the fact that
it has been raised twice, each time by something that outgrew it.
Verified the gate refuses an undeclared bound, a declared one using
forbidden vocabulary, and an allowlist entry that has since been declared.
Suite 115/115.
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.
A Ryzen 3 3200G triple-faulted on its first timer tick after reaching init.
Three defects in a chain, each hiding the one beneath it.
STAR's SYSRET base was 0x10, so SS came back as base+8 = 0x18 with RPL 0
while CS carried RPL 3. Intel ORs RPL 3 into SS on SYSRET; AMD only does so
for CS. Ring 3 ran fine — RPL is not checked on data access — and died the
moment an interrupt tried to IRETQ back, where SS.RPL must equal CS.RPL.
The base now carries the RPL (0x13), as Linux does.
Two fixes below it, both of which made the first one unreadable:
scheduler() read IA32_GS_BASE and dereferenced it without testing for zero,
so every fault reporter faulted in turn — a panic inside a panic, and the
machine reset before printing anything. Cast after the null test, plus a
re-entrancy guard in the panic handler.
NT is now masked in SFMASK alongside the rest, and isr.s exports
isr_return_iretq at the faulting instruction so a frame dump can say which
IRETQ died and print the CS/SS it was about to load. That dump is what
identified the RPL mismatch.
SMAP makes the rule the copy layer has followed since it was written into a
rule the hardware keeps. A ring-0 read or write of a user page now faults,
so any code that reaches for a user pointer directly fails the first time it
runs rather than the first time someone attacks it — and the suite becomes
the enforcement test, because every case exercises the kernel with the bit
on. Nothing had to be fixed to turn it on, which is the retrospective proof
that the nine stragglers converted earlier were all of them.
The interrupt entry needed one instruction first. Hardware does not clear
the alignment-check flag on its way into a handler, and ring 3 sets that
flag freely, so a process could have taken an interrupt with SMAP suspended
for the duration. The system call path was already covered — its flag mask
clears it — but the interrupt path needed a `clac`, which cannot simply be
assembled in: it is an invalid instruction on a processor without SMAP, and
danos boots on those too. So the entry ships as a three-byte NOP and is
patched at boot, through the physmap, because the kernel maps its own text
read-only.
The ordering that makes that safe is enforced rather than described: the
patch sets a flag, and no core will set the SMAP bit until it is true. A
translation that fails, or bytes that read back wrong through the address
they will actually be fetched from, leave the machine unhardened and saying
so — which is the same posture the IOMMU takes, and better than enforcing
over an entry path that cannot comply. The patch runs before interrupts are
enabled and before any second core exists; a comment says so, because the
three bytes pass through an encoding that must never be executed and a
future change that moves this later has to deal with that first.
Suite 114/114, with a case that reads a user page from ring 0 and requires
the fault, and the multi-core case asserting every core that ran work had
the bit — the same shape SMEP got, for the same reason: CR4 is per-core, and
a hardening is only as wide as its narrowest core.
SYSRETQ with a non-canonical RIP raises a general protection fault in ring
0 — on the kernel stack, an instruction after the swapgs that installed the
user's GS base. It is one of the better-known escalation primitives, and
ring 3 reaches it without any kernel bug at all: the processor saves the
address of the instruction after SYSCALL, so a program whose SYSCALL is the
last two bytes of the last canonical page returns to the first
non-canonical address. The new test does exactly that.
The exit path now sign-extends the return address from bit 47 and compares;
if the value changed, it returns through IRETQ instead, which commits the
privilege change before fetching the new address, so the fault arrives from
ring 3 and the process dies like any other. Four register-only operations
and a branch that a correct program can never take — it could not have
executed at a non-canonical address in the first place. Bit 47 is the right
pivot because danos builds four-level page tables and nothing sets the
five-level bit; a future port must move the pivot, and the comment says so.
SFMASK grows one bit while we are here. SYSCALL, unlike an interrupt gate,
does not clear the nested-task flag, so the kernel had been running every
system call with whatever ring 3 last chose — harmless while the only exit
was SYSRETQ, and a question worth not having now that one exit is IRETQ.
The kernel is never nested; ring 3 still gets its own flag back.
Suite 113/113. The new case asserts the refusal counter rather than the
dying process: the emulator we test on kills it either way, so only the
counter distinguishes a guard that ran from one that did not.
SMEP turns the classic escalation — divert kernel control flow into a page
the attacker wrote — from a silent takeover into an immediate fault with
the offending address in the log. The bit is per-core state, so it is set
where the syscall MSRs already are: in the per-CPU bring-up both the boot
processor and every application processor run on their way in. A core that
climbed the trampoline without it would be a hole no boot log would show,
which is why the SMP case now reads CR4 on each core it lands on and
requires every one of them to be hardened, not just the one that printed
the banner.
Enabling it that early is only safe because nothing ring 0 executes is
mapped for ring 3, and that had to be established rather than assumed:
kernel text carries only its ELF flags, the physmap is no-execute, the
trampoline page is mapped supervisor and the core running it has not
enabled the bit yet, and the boot processor turns it on while still on the
loader's tables — which map nothing user-accessible at all. The one
indirect call in the kernel takes a kernel address.
The CPUID probing that was scattered across the timer code becomes a small
shared helper, since the feature question is now asked from two places and
each wanted the same maximum-leaf guard. Absence is tolerated and reported,
like the IOMMU: danos still boots on a machine without the feature, and
says which one it is.
The test harness starts asking QEMU for a CPU that has the bit at all —
its default model has neither SMEP nor SMAP, so the code would otherwise
have been unreachable in every run. No case behaved differently under the
richer model.
Suite 112/112, with a new case that maps an executable user page, calls
into it from the kernel, and requires the fault the CPU is supposed to
raise.
Three services had each written the same thing and got it three different
ways: input polled the process list to notice a dead subscriber, and only
when someone else subscribed; the power service never noticed at all; the
device manager noticed drivers but not subscribers. The harness owns the
table now, driven by the events a protocol declares — it registers on the
reserved verb, frames each event once, posts to everyone interested without
waiting on any of them, and reclaims a slot when the kernel says its owner
died. Interest masks moved to the envelope, so a subscriber that wants only
mice asks the same way everywhere.
Two consequences the plan had not foreseen. The device manager now hears a
supervised child's death twice, once as its supervisor and once as a
subscriber, so restart backoff counted every crash twice and gave up after
half as many; it retires the id before counting. And the kernel's published
exit table had eight slots for what is now six subscriptions in a plain
boot, so it holds sixteen.
The other half is a hole the design named early and left standing: a
backend handed out a small integer and then honoured it from anyone. A
process that guessed a file's node id read another client's file; a display
layer had no owner at all, so any client could reconfigure or destroy any
layer; a USB device token was never checked against the client that opened
it. Each is now bound to the task that opened it, and a wrong owner gets
exactly what an unknown id gets — the refusal must not become the oracle
the identical answers elsewhere were designed to remove. Closing a file
changed with it: it used to succeed unconditionally, which would have told
a caller which ids existed.
Suite 111/111, with a new case in which one process holds a file and a
layer, hands both ids to a second process, and finds them untouched after
that process has tried everything with them.
The folded header stops being a rule in a document and becomes the layout
on the wire. Verbs number from sixteen, leaving describe, enumerate,
subscribe and unsubscribe reserved and answered the same way by every
provider — none of them writes a line to do it. What each protocol used to
carry in a field of its own now travels in the header: a vfs node and a
display layer are the packet's target, and a reply opens with a status the
envelope stamps rather than one each protocol spelled for itself.
Display gains the most. One forty-byte request had served eleven verbs, so
attach_scanout smuggled stride through x, refresh through y and format
through colour, and every coordinate crossed as a bitcast. Per-operation
structs end all three: the fields have their own names and their own signs,
and the tile payload grows to 224 bytes because the prefix shrank. Scanout
loses a message maximum of 64 it had no business declaring — it answers
calls, and the floor for a call is 256 — and virtio-gpu stops hard-coding
that number at its harness.
Two changes are semantic rather than notational. A directory now ends at an
entry with no name, because the fixed part of a reply always travels and a
zero-length reply no longer exists to mean anything. And input joins the
service harness, the last loop in the tree that answered no ping and heard
no terminate; its subscriber table, its pruning and its fan-out are the
same code, and a shutdown now asks it to stop instead of killing it.
A new conformance case reads the registry's own listing and asks every
protocol it finds for its name, its version and its verb count, then offers
a verb nobody defines and requires -ENOSYS — the envelope's promise,
checked against providers rather than against itself. What it cannot reach
in that boot it names on the serial line instead of passing quietly.
Suite 110/110.
The registry consults the open rows it has been parsing since P2, so
reaching a contract now takes a grant as well as a binding. A caller
without one is answered exactly as it would be for a name nobody ever
bound: same status, same empty reply, same absent capability, byte for
byte, and no log line on either path — klog_read is ungated, so a line on
one and not the other would be the oracle the design set out to remove.
Refusal and absence being one answer is what lets a supervisor later
narrow, fake or park a child's namespace without the child learning what
it was denied.
The manifest gains a third permission for a shape the plan did not
foresee: attestation is one hop, but the driver tree is three deep — the
PS/2 keyboard and mouse are spawned by ps2-bus, which the device manager
spawned — so no row could name them and PS/2 input would simply stop.
A supervise grant lets a delegate vouch for what its children *reach*,
never for what they claim; the bind path is untouched, and the laundering
deputy is still refused.
The review found the receive side of a rule this track had already
written down. Every process holds a sendable handle to the registrar —
resolve installs one for anyone who asks — and ipc_reply_wait never asked
who owned the endpoint, so a stranger could dequeue there: take the
provider endpoints riding bind requests, and answer other clients' opens
in the registrar's name. Receiving is the owner's privilege, like binding
a signal or a timer; sending remains anyone's.
Suite 109/109.
A protocol is reached by name now, not by a compile-time integer. Init is
PID 1 and already knows which binary it started, so init serves /protocol
as a vfs backend: bind claims a contract with the provider's endpoint
attached, open answers with that endpoint as the reply's capability, and
readdir lists what is bound with the task and binary behind it. The kernel
reserves the prefix — nothing may mount over it, under it, or unmount it —
and ServiceId, ipc_register and ipc_lookup are gone, their syscall numbers
left vacant.
A bind is authorized by who the caller *is*: the kernel-stamped binary
together with the supervising task's identity, matched against
/system/configuration/protocol.csv. Identity, not spelling — spawn is
ungated, so an attacker can run any bundled binary, and a name-only rule
would have let it launder grants through an init of its own making. A name
a live process holds is refused to everyone else; a dead one's is released.
Three review rounds against a hostile ring-3 process found what 108 green
tests could not, because the suite contains no attacker. Publishing init's
supervision endpoint as the registry put PID 1's mailbox in every process's
hands, where two forged bytes reached the shutdown path: privileged traffic
is now believed only from the task that holds the contract it speaks for.
A capability arriving on a request outlived every path that ignored it,
one handle per call until the table was full — in init, and in the harness
ten services share — so the arriving capability is owned by the turn and
released unless a handler says otherwise. And the kernel let anyone holding
an endpoint handle aim signals, timers, exit notices and interrupts at it:
binding now requires having created it.
Suite 108/108. The new protocol-registry case asserts eleven properties,
each one an attack that must fail.
A new user-memory module owns every kernel touch of a user buffer:
copyFromUser, the new copyToUser, and the resolve behind both. The walk
accumulates the U/S and writable bits down all four levels with the MMU's
own AND rule — folding a 2 MiB leaf in before it resolves and refusing a
1 GiB leaf outright — so a copy honours what ring 3 itself would be
allowed, closing the presence-only trust model the IPC layer carried since
bring-up. It then confirms the frame is physmap-backed, because that is how
the copy reaches it: an mmio_map'd BAR passes the permission walk and would
otherwise fault ring 0 on an alias the physmap never mapped, on the IPC path
as much as the new one.
The nine stragglers that dereferenced user pointers raw now route through
it, so a bad pointer returns -EFAULT where it used to fault the kernel.
The write direction restructures its callees around kernel bounce buffers:
scheduler and devices-broker enumerate from a slot cursor (a task exiting
between chunks can neither duplicate nor lose an entry), klog_read drains
the ring in chunks, and fs_node stages headers and names contiguously.
fs_resolve copies out before installing the endpoint handle, so a faulting
copy cannot strand a capability; its out-capacity bound no longer adds an
unbounded ring-3 length to the base, which wrapped and trapped the kernel's
own overflow check. debug_write reads the caller's message once.
Suite 107/107 (new user-memory case: seven bad pointers refused, each
paired with a sound call that must still succeed).
/etc/init.csv and /etc/devices.csv become /system/configuration/*.csv (the
repo's etc/ moves to system/configuration/, mirroring the runtime tree),
/var/log becomes /system/logs, and /mnt/usb becomes /volumes/usb. The
kernel VFS gains a carve-out so FAT may serve exactly /system/configuration
and /system/logs beneath the initrd-backed /system while /system and /test
themselves stay unshadowable; FAT's single /var mount splits into those two
rewritten mounts. The kvfs readdir check learns /system's third child and
the ramdisk spawn sweep skips the configuration tree.
Suite 106/106.
VT-d and AMD-Vi are x86 hardware, but lived in the architecture-neutral
kernel tree and leaked further: the core's public Kind enum named both
vendors, and the ACPI parser read the VT-d version/capability registers
(raw volatile MMIO inside table discovery). Now the vendor backends
live in architecture/x86_64/ behind architecture.iommu — the core hands
over the discovery facts plus an injected environment (frame allocation
+ the log sink, the same pattern enablePaging uses) and receives the
hardware vtable back, so the backends never import kernel internals and
an ARM port supplies its SMMU with no core change. Discovery keeps
table facts only; the live-unit register check moved into VT-d detect
(version reading zero now stays fail-open). The unused kindOf() is
gone. Log shapes the harness pins (iommu online, DANOS-IOMMU-FAULT)
are unchanged; all five IOMMU QEMU cases pass.
initial_ramdisk's spawn-everything sweep counted the /etc data files
(devices.csv, init.csv) as spawnable programs — BadElf ever since the
boot tree started ferrying them — so it now counts only the /system and
/test trees. The init test waited for two raw user writes before
checking the last write for the heartbeat text; init's boot chatter
(heap ok, the /etc/init.csv lookup) satisfies the count long before the
first beat, so it now waits for the heartbeat itself. Both cases pass
again; these failures predate the build-packages work.
The second hardware backend. The IOMMU core, DMA-region capabilities, and
per-device enforcement are unchanged; this adds AMD-Vi (IVRS) as an
alternative to Intel VT-d (DMAR) under the same Backend vtable.
- parseIvrs records the IOMMU control-register base from the first IVHD;
the platform layer gains iommu_is_amd, and the core picks the backend by
vendor at init. VT-d and AMD-Vi are mutually exclusive on real hardware.
- iommu-amd.zig: a 2 MiB device table (every DTE zeroed = deny-all until a
device is claimed), AMD native-format page tables (4 KiB leaves), a
command buffer (INVALIDATE_DEVTAB_ENTRY / INVALIDATE_IOMMU_PAGES /
COMPLETION_WAIT) and an event log for faults. The DTE forwards
interrupts unmapped, so MSI passthrough works exactly as on VT-d.
- The boot log and the iommu self-test are now vendor-aware.
**UNTESTED on real AMD hardware** — danos is developed on Intel, so this
is validated only against QEMU's amd-iommu, and every log line and doc
says so. QEMU quirk handled: its amd-iommu does not observe the
COMPLETION_WAIT store form, but consumes the command ring synchronously on
the tail-register write, so invalidations are already applied by the time
we poll — the backend warns once and proceeds.
Cases: amd-iommu (detection + scratch-domain walker) and
amd-iommu-usb-storage (full storage stack through AMD device-table
translation with per-grant capabilities), both green. 106/106.
This completes the IOVA/IOMMU-enforcement track: per-device DMA domains on
both vendors, with buffers reachable only through delegated capabilities.
Replaces L2's interim DMA pool (every buffer reachable by every claimed
device) with true per-grant confinement: a device reaches only buffers
whose capability was delegated to its driver.
Kernel:
- DmaRegionObject (handle kind 2): a delegation token naming a dma_alloc'd
region, passable across processes on the IPC cap slot like an endpoint
or shared-memory object. Frames stay owned by the allocating address
space (freed on dma_free/teardown as before); the token carries a `dead`
flag so a stale downstream handle can no longer bind a freed region.
- dma_alloc gains the dma_shareable flag: it returns a capability handle
in r8 and every region is tracked in a registry. A task's own regions
auto-bind into the devices it claims (its rings just work); foreign
buffers are bound explicitly.
- dma_bind / dma_unbind / handle_close syscalls (51-53). dma_bind maps a
held region (or shared-memory) capability into a claimed device's domain;
it is idempotent. handle_close reclaims a table slot (raised 16 -> 32).
- dma_free and task death unmap a region from every domain and invalidate
BEFORE its frames return to the allocator — the stale-IOTLB use-after-
free window, closed structurally.
Protocols (flag-day): block gains attach, usb-transfer gains dma_attach —
each carries a region capability on the cap slot. fat allocates its bounce
buffer shareable and attaches it; usb-storage allocates its transport
buffers shareable, attaches them to the controller, and forwards fat's
capability downstream; usb-xhci-bus binds and closes; virtio-gpu binds its
shared scanout surface. The physical addresses on the wire are unchanged
(identity IOVA), so no register-programming code moved.
Cross-process DMA (fat -> usb-storage -> xHC) now flows only through
delegated capabilities. iommu-usb-storage / iommu-usb-hid / iommu-fault
all green under per-grant enforcement; 104/104 overall (fail-open paths
unchanged).
Replaces L1's shared blanket identity domain with a private translation
domain per claimed PCI function. A device now reaches only:
- the DMA pool: every dma_alloc'd region, mapped into every claimed
device's domain (poolAdd/poolRemove, driven from the dma_alloc and
dma_free syscalls). This keeps the cross-process buffer handoff
working (fat's bounce buffer reaches the xHC) while blocking the
kernel, page tables, process heaps, MMIO, and unallocated RAM.
- its own firmware reserved region (RMRR), seeded at confine time.
The pool is the honest interim: devices can still reach one another's
DMA buffers. The DMA-region capability layer (next) narrows it to
per-grant reachability.
dma_free unmaps from every domain and invalidates BEFORE the frames
return to the allocator, closing the stale-IOTLB use-after-free window.
Driver death tears down its domains (detach + free tables) before the
broker claims and DMA frames are released.
New iommu_fault_drain syscall (+ driver.iommuFaultDrain) forces pending
fault records to the log on demand. The new iommu-fault case proves it:
a claimed e1000e is programmed to DMA-fetch its TX ring from an unmapped
page; VT-d faults the access (bdf 00:03.0 addr 0x1000 reason 0x6) and the
system stays alive. 104/104.
First enforcement step of the IOVA track. A vendor-neutral IOMMU core
(iommu.zig) drives an Intel VT-d backend (iommu-intel.zig) to give DMA a
real translation layer instead of the fail-open free-for-all M16 left.
- Boot posture is now stated explicitly: "iommu online (Intel VT-d)"
with version/agaw/rmrr, or "none present - DMA fail-open (unisolated)".
- DMAR parsing extended to select the INCLUDE_PCI_ALL unit (real Intel
PCs put an iGPU-scoped unit first) and record single-path-endpoint
RMRRs; multi-hop scopes and extra DRHDs are counted and warned, never
silently dropped.
- Translation is enabled at boot into a blanket identity domain (all RAM
+ RMRRs, 2 MiB leaves). PCI functions are enumerated post-boot by the
ring-3 pci-bus driver, so a device is attached to the domain when its
driver claims it (confineDevice, with claim rollback if confinement
fails) and detached on driver death, before broker release and DMA
frame teardown. Unclaimed devices are non-present: their DMA faults.
- Interrupt remapping stays off, so MSI writes to 0xFEE00000 bypass
translation and the interrupt-driven xHC keeps working.
- devices-broker gains pciAddressOf (derives BDF from the config-space
ECAM offset), unclaim, and forEachPciFunction.
Faults are drained and logged rate-limited as DANOS-IOMMU-FAULT.
Cases: iommu extended (translation on, scratch-domain map/resolve/unmap,
zero idle faults); new iommu-usb-storage and iommu-usb-hid run the full
storage + input stacks through translated DMA with MSI intact. 103/103.
library/device/pci is now the complete generic floor a leaf PCI driver
needs, instead of just what virtio-gpu used:
- pci-class: capability IDs, MSI/MSI-X/power-management/PCI-Express
register layouts, extended-capability header decode (host-tested),
per-bit command constants, remaining header offsets.
- pci.Function: header accessors, disableBusMaster + interrupt-disable
helpers, findCapability, programMsi/disableMsi, MsiX vector-table
struct, ensurePowerStateD0, functionLevelReset (BAR save/restore),
extended-capability iterator.
Proven by the new pci-caps QEMU case: a pci-cap-test fixture claims an
extra e1000e (PM+MSI+PCIe+MSI-X, no danos driver) and readback-verifies
every surface, including the first driver-side use of msi_bind.
usb-xhci-bus converts from 8 ms event-ring polling to message-signalled
interrupts: plain MSI where offered (real Intel xHC), MSI-X entry 0
otherwise (qemu-xhci has no MSI capability), byte-identical polling as
fallback. The timer survives as a 250 ms port-reconcile/lost-edge tick —
real-hardware USB2 hub debounce still needs it. MSI setup runs BEFORE
controller bring-up: QEMU's xhci only registers the MSI-X vector as used
when IMAN.IE is written while MSI-X is already enabled; interrupts are
silently dropped otherwise (real hardware does not care about the order).
101/101 QEMU cases green; real-hardware smoke passed (mouse works,
boot 2026-07-23T174805Z, plain-MSI branch, vector 33).
The 11 QEMU-suite fixtures lived mixed into system/services/ with their
binaries bundled at /system/tests/<name>. Now the repo path is the boot
path, like every real service: test/system/services/<name>. fat-test
moves out of the fat server's directory into its own; display-demo
stays a boot service.
- kernel VFS: setInitialRamdisk derives one read-only initrd mount per
top-level tree named by the ramdisk entry paths (/system, /test),
registers ancestors generically with self-parented roots, and refuses
backend shadowing of any initrd tree
- EFI loader: the fallback walk also enumerates \test (optional — a
volume without fixtures still boots); manifest and capsule unchanged
- path literals: vfs-test self-open + create probe, process-test
process_enumerate matches, the args-echo argv[0] expectation; the
kvfs case now covers the /test root end to end
- docs: DFHS /test rows, tree diagrams, loader prose, and the location
convention gain the third home; fixed the input-source link
100/100 QEMU cases pass.
Follow-up cleanup of the just-moved kernel device code:
- power.zig -> acpi.zig. Its reboot() is built entirely on the FADT reset
register (acpi.power_information) plus the legacy 0xCF9/8042 fallbacks — it is
ACPI reboot, so it becomes acpi.reboot (the "P" in ACPI). platform.reboot
still delegates; soft-off/S5 stays the ring-3 acpi service's job as before.
- device-tree.zig -> fdt.zig. It is a discovery *backend* (the ARM/FDT parser,
a sibling of acpi.zig), not part of the model — renaming it to its actual
subject kills the confusing device-tree / device-model DeviceTree name clash
and makes acpi.zig + fdt.zig read as the two parallel backends.
- Flatten: device-model.zig, acpi.zig, fdt.zig, platform.zig move out of the
system/kernel/devices/ subdir up into system/kernel/, joining devices-broker.zig
(already flat). The kernel dir is a flat pile by convention (only architecture/
is a subdir), so the subdir — and its poor "devices" name — is gone.
Pure restructure; "platform" module name unchanged, all cross-file deps are
relative siblings that moved together. zig build + test green; smoke, discovery,
acpi-parse, acpi-ps2, acpi-report, power-button, orderly-shutdown, reboot pass.
With the shared device data (device-abi, pci-class, usb-abi, usb-ids, acpi-ids,
aml) now in library/device/, what remained in system/devices/ was purely
kernel-internal: the firmware-discovery machinery and the rich pointer-based
device model (platform, device-model, acpi, device-tree, power), reached only
through the "platform" module by three kernel files. It belongs with the kernel.
Move it to system/kernel/devices/. A pure relocation: the "platform" module
name is unchanged and every cross-dir dependency is a module import, so only the
one b.path and some comments move. The top-level split is now clean —
system/kernel/ is the kernel, library/device/ the shared device libraries,
system/{drivers,services} the userspace. The runtime /system/devices concept
(the virtual device tree) is unaffected; system/kernel/devices/ is its
implementation.
Also fixes two comment refs that still pointed device-abi at its pre-Wave-1a
home (system/devices/) — it lives at library/device/model/ now.
zig build + test green; smoke, discovery, acpi-parse, acpi-ps2, acpi-report pass.
The adversarial review of the branch confirmed the big one: the shm/DMA
page-table walks and their pmm/heap calls ran outside the big kernel lock —
pre-existing, but fatal once the per-space cursors invited sibling threads to
race them (two concurrent creates could orphan a page table: one thread's
region silently unmapped, the frame leaked — a plausible root for the
long-standing intermittent AP ring-3 fault at the shm base). All three paths
now follow the mmap discipline: allocation, object build, record, and handle
under one lock hold with full rollback; the map itself per-page under brief
holds; dma_free's translate/unmap/free per-page likewise.
Contract edges from the same review: thread_spawn into a dying group returns
-ESRCH (was generic -1); process_kill during the condemned window answers
from the latch's stashed supervisor (0 or -EPERM, was -ESRCH once the leader
slot was reaped); exit derives the group reason from its own argument rather
than the racy exit_code global; a worker's thread_exit no longer overwrites a
concurrent group-kill stamp; checkGroupDead now asserts exactly-one
notification via the drained ring. Full suite: 100/100.
Eight new QEMU cases (thread-fault-group, kill-threaded-group,
kill-via-worker-tid, racing-triggers, exit-group, leader-thread-exit,
thread-exit-solo, shm-mapping-ref) driving seven new thread-test modes; a
shared checkGroupDead asserts the contract everywhere: one notification,
badged with the leader, reason on the leader's record, no member listed,
claims released first.
The shm-mapping-ref case flushed out the per-task DMA/shared-memory arena
cursor bug directly (a sibling's regions mapped over the worker's), so both
cursors moved to the AddressSpaceRef like the mmap/MMIO cursors before them
(threading M7 pattern). Runtime gains Thread.tryExitCurrent for the leader
-EPERM refusal path. Docs updated: threading.md's shared-fate gap is closed,
process-management.md and process-lifecycle.md describe the leader re-key,
plan status = implemented. Full suite: 100/100.
Each address space that maps a shared-memory region now holds its own
reference, recorded on the AddressSpaceRef and dropped when the space is
destroyed — so 'last reference' means no handles AND no mappings, and a
region's frames can no longer be freed out from under a sibling thread (or
any other live mapper) when the handle-holding task dies. The group-death
notification still posts after every mapping release. (docs/shared-fate-plan.md M3)
All process deaths (exit from any thread, ring-3 fault, process_kill) now kill
the whole thread group via killGroupLocked: latch the AddressSpaceRef as dying
(refusing new members, closing the thread_spawn escape), stamp every member
(leader carries the group reason — the record the supervisor reads), reap
parked members to fixpoint, condemn running ones. The leader's exit
notification and subscriber broadcast move to the group-death moment — the
last address-space reference drop — via scheduler.group_exit_hook, which
re-stamps the leader's exit record first. Leader thread_exit is refused with
-EPERM. kill_pending is atomic; exit_reason and fault_kill_count writes moved
under the big kernel lock. (docs/shared-fate-plan.md M2)
Every task carries its process leader's id (main task: own id; threads:
copied from the spawner; kernel tasks: 0, never followed). process_kill and
process_signal resolve any member id to the leader and authorize against the
leader's supervisor, making both capabilities per-process. ProcessDescriptor
gains the leader field. No fan-out yet (docs/shared-fate-plan.md M1).
Every doc verified claim-by-claim against the code by parallel audit agents,
then fixed and adversarially re-verified. Two waves of staleness corrected:
the originally audited findings (higher-half boot handoff, kernel VFS
takeover, fault isolation + claim release + driver restart, AML/S5 moving to
ring 3, threading's shipped design, USB+FAT landing) and a second pass of
adjacent claims the verifiers caught (smp.md 'not built yet' intro,
system-requirements' PS/2-only and no-storage claims, halting.md's red-panic
and no-IDT text, testing.md's serial mirroring, router-era vfs-protocol
wording, capsule-first boot loading).
threading.md now documents the shared-fate gap explicitly: the design says a
process dies whole, the kernel today kills only the offending thread.
Also fixes three stale code comments (isr.s exceptionHandler, acpi.zig
sleepValue, build.zig boot-volume) — comments only, no behavior change.
Verified every deferred item in the nine docs with a what's-next section and
marked what has since landed (reaper, per-process CR3, higher-half kernel,
kernel heap, contiguous frame alloc, RSDP capture, cap-passing, driver restart
with backoff, PS/2 keyboard) while keeping the genuinely open items. Also
corrects interrupts.md's claim that the keyboard skipped the IO-APIC, and
updates scheduler.zig/heap.zig comments that predated the reaper and the big
kernel lock.
B2 — the 1-in-3 boot-time READ CAPACITY failure, root-caused: the xHCI
library's awaitTransfer claimed ANY unclaimed transfer event as its own
completion. An interrupt-endpoint event whose TRB pointer no longer
matched the armed subscription (an error or stale completion from the
keyboard/mouse polling concurrently with storage bring-up) fell through
and was misread as the bulk transfer's completion — desynchronizing the
mass-storage bulk protocol in controller state that SURVIVED driver
restarts, so every retry failed too. Awaited transfers now match the
event's slot id and endpoint DCI; foreign events are dropped and named.
Twelve consecutive runs of the previously-flaky cases pass; the full
suite is green with none of its old intermittents.
B1 — and when storage does fail transiently, the system now heals
instead of giving up forever: a nonzero exit maps to ExitReason.aborted
(a deliberate FAILURE exit — supervisors restart those with backoff,
unlike a clean .exited), usb-storage exits nonzero when a PRESENT
device fails bring-up, and the fat service no longer blocks its harness
polling for a block device and then dies — it serves immediately
(requests fail politely), retries on a 500 ms timer, and mounts
whenever storage appears, including after a driver restart.
First real per-process logs off the stick (the logging track paying for
itself): kernel.log showed 16-core bring-up costing 47 s — per-core gaps
of 2-21 s — on a machine whose clocksource is the TSC, so every AP runs
the pairwise warp check. QEMU always picks HPET, so the harness never
executed this path at all.
The check was bounded by ITERATIONS: 1<<20 warp ticks, each a locked
read-modify-write on a cacheline two cores fight over — microseconds
under real contention, not the nanosecond the '~1 ms' comment assumed —
and the 1<<32-PAUSE rendezvous 'bound' is ~2 minutes on modern Intel
(PAUSE ~140 cycles). Both are now bounded by TIME measured on the TSC
itself: ~5 ms of pairwise hammering per core (Linux's check_tsc_warp
budget — ample to catch a lagging TSC) and a ~100 ms rendezvous window.
The scroll path copied every pixel row up by one glyph height, READING
video memory — and VRAM reads are uncached-slow on real hardware.
Measured on the 16-core PC: ~90 seconds to bring the cores online,
almost entirely boot-transcript lines each paying a whole-screen scroll
copy. (QEMU never shows this: its 'VRAM' is host RAM.)
When the screen fills, the console now clears and restarts at the top —
writes only, once per screenful. The transcript reads the same as it
streams; only the scrollback illusion is gone, which a boot console
never needed.
Without serial and without working USB storage, a slow real-hardware
boot is undiagnosable — 'stabbing in the dark'. Two changes end that:
The log renderer stamps every line with boot-relative seconds
([ 12.045] ...), so every surface — serial, debugcon, and now the
screen — is a readable timeline. And the framebuffer console registers
as an ordinary log sink at boot: kernel AND userspace lines (device
bring-up, fat mounts, logger announcements) show live on screen until
the display service claims the framebuffer, which flips the console's
suppression and silences the sink automatically — the display-owns-the-
screen design is unchanged in normal operation; the console now simply
narrates the part of boot that happens before there IS a display.
On the machine that motivated this, the next boot will show by eye
where the minutes go — including whether the USB chain ever brings
storage up, and whether screen drawing itself crawls (the latent
non-write-combining framebuffer suspect: if these very lines paint
slowly, that's the answer).
Per docs/coding-standards.md (no Unix-abbreviation exception): syscalls
shared_memory_create/map/physical, kernel SharedMemoryObject + handlers,
runtime.shared_memory (library/runtime/shared-memory.zig), the
shared-memory-server/-client test services, the shared-memory QEMU case,
and docs incl. vdso.md's danos_shared_memory_*. 87/87 QEMU tests pass.
runtime.fs now routes every path through fs_resolve: kernel-served
/system nodes are read via fs_node (tokens, no open state); everything
under a userspace mount goes straight to the owning backend's endpoint
with the kernel-rewritten mount-relative path — one syscall of naming,
then the unchanged vfs-protocol rendezvous, public API untouched. mkdir/
unlink/rename resolve-then-forward (rename checks both paths land on
the SAME backend); mount is the fs_mount syscall.
The fat server mounts twice — /mnt/usb from the volume root and /var
from its /var subtree — so the logger now writes the FHS path
/var/log/<boot-stamp>/... and swapping the persistent medium later
touches only fat's two mount calls. With clients holding fat's node ids
directly, fat records each handle's owner, checks it, and sweeps a dead
client's handles via the published exit events (the old router's
pattern, now where the state actually lives).
The userspace vfs server and its router die; ServiceId.vfs=1 stays
reserved-retired; protocol.zig moves to system/vfs-protocol.zig (the
wire contract is backend-only now). vfs-test becomes the ring-3 proof
of the kernel VFS (own-binary ELF magic through /system, read-only
refusals, listing); vfs-client-death becomes the fat sweep test over
the full storage chain, with a ring-scanning check (the last-write
buffer is too racy under a chattering tree).
system/kernel/vfs.zig is the resolve+redirect router: fs_resolve (#46)
walks the kernel mount table; a path under the kernel-backed /system
mount (the initrd, seeded by setInitialRamdisk with a derived directory
table) yields a permanent stateless node token served by fs_node (#47)
— read/status/readdir with copy-out, initrd reads lock-free — while a
path under a userspace mount yields the backend's endpoint (installed
in the caller's table, DEDUPLICATED so 16 slots can't be exhausted by
repeated resolves) plus the rewritten mount-relative path; the caller
then speaks the unchanged vfs-protocol rendezvous directly. The kernel
never blocks on a userspace filesystem, holds no open-file state, and
refuses create-intent on the immutable /system.
fs_mount (#48) is the syscall form of the old router's op-6 cap-pass
(possession of the backend handle is the capability; an optional
rewrite prefix maps the mount into the backend's namespace — how /var
will reach the flash volume); fs_unmount (#49) removes one. A dead
backend's mount clears lazily on resolve.
Dormant this milestone: the userspace vfs still serves runtime.fs
unchanged; the kvfs QEMU case covers the kernel side (resolution, ELF
magic read-through, /system listing, read-only + unknown refusals)
until the M-G cutover exercises the syscalls end-to-end.
tests.zig wrote markers straight to serial, racing user-process records
rendered on other cores — visible as 16-byte UART-FIFO interleave once
the tagged renderer emitted several writes per record. Markers now go
through kernel log print (same serial sink, now under the log lock), the
renderer composes each line into one buffer and hits each sink once, and
the vfs-client-death needle drops the old self-written 'vfs: ' prefix.
Daniel Samson