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.
These were the awkward ones. Each began with an operation packed into a
single byte — two of them with a version wedged in beside it — so there was
no wrapping them: the layouts had to be rebuilt. The device manager's own
enumerate and subscribe become the reserved verbs that mean the same thing
everywhere, its replies lose three status structs the envelope already
carries, and a device id becomes the packet's target. Power drops the
version it repeated on every request, because describe is the handshake,
and stops claiming a 64-byte ceiling it never needed for calls. USB moves a
control transfer's data to the packet tail in both directions, which makes
the status length the transferred length and retires a field that had been
saying the same thing twice.
The danger in this one was not the protocols but their readers. Init
recognised a power button by two bytes at the head of a message, the ACPI
service dispatched on the first byte, the xHCI driver read its operation
with a raw integer load, and the HID drivers reinterpreted a report
wholesale — none of which would have failed to compile once the layouts
moved. They would simply have stopped: no shutdown on the power button, no
reports from the keyboard. Every one of them now reads through the
generated types, and the shutdown gate that answers only a subscriber is
the same code it was.
Two sizes were decided by measuring rather than assuming. The child-added
message is both a request and the event broadcast to subscribers, and
alignment rounds it to 48 bytes, which puts its packet exactly on the
64-byte push floor — a test pins that, because a field added carelessly
would now overflow it. The interrupt report gives up eight bytes of inline
room to make space for the header; the two drivers that produce reports
send eight and four.
Suite 110/110.
Replace the three hardcoded switch tables (pciDriverForIdentity, hidDriverFor,
usbDriverForIdentity) with an authoritative, human-readable device registry the
manager reads at boot. Matching is most-specific-wins across
base/subclass/prog_if/vendor/device/subsystem/hid, so a precise vendor:device
rule and a generic class rule coexist; an unmatched device is logged, never
guessed. This resolves docs' "matching stays code until the third bus".
- ABI: child_added and DeviceDescriptor gain vendor/device/subsystem; child_added
gains a bus discriminator (BusKind) so PCI and USB class triples match against
the right namespace.
- pci-bus reads vendor/device (config 0x00) and subsystem (0x2C, type-0) and
reports them.
- library/device/registry: freestanding CSV parser + matchDriver() with
specificity scoring; 5 unit tests wired into `zig build test`.
- etc/devices.csv bundled into the initrd; the kernel serves /etc directly, so
the manager reads it before any filesystem service is up (fat starts later).
- virtio-gpu: drop the now-redundant post-spawn 1AF4:1050 re-confirm, since the
registry binds this driver by exact identity.
- Remove the orphaned system/drivers/display driver (unreferenced by build or
registry).
- docs: new devices-csv.md; device-manager.md "matching stays code" resolved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KJqSiLLchDUUCoXn5jsiwd
Daniel Samson
Daniel Samson