The load-bearing step. The FAT service stops acquiring its own volume: the
volume manager spawns it (per volume), defines its partition range on the
storage driver BEFORE it runs, and answers its startup hello with the
range-confined block channel over a new volume-manager protocol. fat never
finds its storage by name and never sees the whole device — establishment
by lineage, one layer up from the driver tree.
- New library/protocol/volume-manager: one verb, hello(volume-id) -> the
block channel as the reply capability (the P0 reply-cap path).
- The volume manager becomes the confinement CONTROLLER: it defines the first
range on usb-storage, so no other party can confine a filesystem. It
supervises the filesystems it spawns and respawns one on death (the reap-
and-rebuild the device manager proved, one layer up).
- fat: drops acquireVolume(device-manager); hellos the volume manager for its
channel; reads its volume id from argv[1]. main takes process.Init now.
- init.csv no longer spawns fat (the volume manager does); protocol.csv
rewires fat to be supervised by the volume manager (bind vfs, open
volume-manager) and drops fat open device-manager.
- The block-range fixture boots registry + device-manager only (not the full
tree), so the volume manager is absent and the fixture stays the sole
confinement definer — otherwise the volume manager would take the
controller first and refuse it.
Verified end to end (VM probes -> spawns fat -> confines it -> hands over the
channel -> fat mounts) and neutral: 18/18 across the fat family, logging,
shutdown, both IOMMU variants, usb restart, vfs, conformance, confinement.
The storage layer gains its policy home (storage-architecture.md): a new
system/services/volume-manager, spawned by init, that acquires the mass-
storage block channel through the device manager (the same lineage a
filesystem uses), reads block 0, and parses the first volume out of it. The
partition-table walk that lived in the FAT engine moves here, above the
driver where it belongs (partition.zig, host-tested: MBR entry, bare-FAT,
no-signature). Identity is the MBR disk signature + partition index — the
weak rung of the ladder; GPT GUID and FAT serial refine identityOf without
changing shape.
This increment is discovery + probe + log only, additive: the FAT service
still acquires its own volume, so nothing changes for it. Confining each
filesystem to its partition and spawning one per volume (the flip) lands
next, keeping fat working throughout.
Grants + wiring: init.csv spawns it after the device manager; protocol.csv
grants bind volume-manager + open device-manager. Verified: volume-probe
asserts the parse (bare-FAT volume at lba 0), neutral 10/10 across storage,
restart, display, logging, confinement — the volume manager now runs in
every boot and disturbs nothing.
/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.
Daniel Samson