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.
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.
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.
The security-track design set. communication.md is the model: four layers
(namespace / protocol / channel / transport), packets and signals, parties
addressed by the channel and objects by target, transports as replaceable
buffer+doorbell mechanisms. protocol-namespace.md is L3+L2: /protocol names
contracts, resolution establishes a channel, init is the registrar,
restriction is per-process namespace delegation (with the microphone-prompt
worked example), the envelope is the universal packet header, migration
P1-P5 retires ServiceId. file-system-hierarchy.md replaces the unix-FHS
spec with the danos-native tree (/applications, /protocol, /system,
/volumes) and its migration table. ipc.md is re-cut as the kernel-ipc
transport document. smep-smap.md designs the kernel hardening: copy
discipline for the eight raw user-pointer syscalls, then SMEP, then SMAP
as a permanent tripwire.
Every binary's build.zig now names precisely the modules its source
imports (derived by scanning each artifact's sources, transitively
through same-directory files), and its zon carries only the domains
those come from — kernel stays implicit (the root shim + link script
live there). build-support's userBinary resolves each name through one
module-to-domain table (module_homes); Domains/domains()/defaultImports
and the raw recipe entry point are deleted. An undeclared @import is a
compile error (verified: injecting @import("xkeyboard-config") into
logger fails with 'no module named ... available within module
program'), and e.g. xkeyboard-config now appears in exactly two
manifests — the two keyboard drivers. Availability never bloated the
emitted binaries (Zig compiles only what a program imports); this makes
the declared interfaces honest. Production and -Dtest-case manifests
byte-identical; all build variants and standalone package builds
green.
The checklist (with the Intel UHD 750 worked example) existed only as
an untracked file in the main checkout — the plan referenced it but no
branch could see it. It lands here with its build step rewritten
against the finished package template: create the driver's own
build.zig/zon from the pci-bus template, then one dependency + one
boot-tree row + one zon line in the root build. devices-csv.md's
adding-a-driver section and the plan's checklist references point at
it again.
The plan doc's status records completion (all waves + phase 3) and its
execution notes describe the finished shape; the fresh-session pointer
names build-support's userBinary instead of the deleted
addUserBinaryImpl, and the size-check carry-along note is discharged.
README gains the build/ directory in the layout tree and splits the
source-map row across root build.zig / build/images.zig /
build/qemu.zig. testing.md points at the distributed per-package test
steps; threading.md, threading-plan.md, driver-model.md, efi.md,
display.md, system-requirements.md, and devices-csv.md's adding-a-
driver checklist stop describing the pre-package build.
Review findings: the plan doc claimed no implementation existed, had the
domain dependency order wrong (kernel depends on protocol; device on
kernel + protocol + csv), never placed the three shared contracts, and
named a nonexistent new-driver-checklist.md. Its status now records the
implemented phases (and the deliberate pci-bus-first pilot), the target
shape carries the contract placements and the path-dependency-only
constraint on the kernel package's out-of-root abi export, and the
execution notes describe the post-pilot build for whichever session
runs the remaining waves. README's repo layout gains build-support/
and the packages-note; driver-model, threading, system-requirements,
and the two display plan docs stop citing root build.zig for recipe
facts that now live in build-support.
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