Retire the build-time ramdisk packer and the packed initial-ramdisk.img.
make-fat-image.py now lays every user binary out at its FHS path on the
boot volume (system/services, system/drivers, system/tests), and the EFI
loader walks \system at boot, packing what it finds into an in-RAM v2
initial_ramdisk whose entry names are full FHS paths. init rides the
table like every other binary: its dedicated handoff fields are gone and
the kernel spawns PID 1 via the same lookup as everyone else
(process.spawnBundled).
system_spawn resolves names by exact path first, then unique basename,
and normalizes argv[0] to the stored path — so task names (and, next,
the tagged log ring's attribution) are honest binary paths everywhere.
initrd v2 rejects the old magic so a stale image fails loudly.
Groundwork for per-process logging (/var/log/<boot-stamp>/<binary-path>.log)
and the kernel-VFS /system mount.
Applications ask the device manager for the tree (enumerate: a header
plus ChildEntry records) and subscribe to published add/remove events by
handing their endpoint over as the call's capability — the input-service
pattern; events are the same ChildAdded/ChildRemoved structs the bus
drivers send, one encoding in both directions. device-list is the first
client: it prints the tree, subscribes, and narrates the events through
a driver restart. The protocol's message maximum is capped at the
kernel's IPC MESSAGE_MAXIMUM (256 bytes, ten entries per reply; paging
joins the protocol when a tree outgrows one message). The startUserTask
debug print is gone: it wrote to serial unserialized against user-space
lines and sheared concurrent log markers in half — the root cause of the
scenario flakes.
Signals are statements delivered as coalescing notifications to the
endpoint a process nominates with signal_bind — never a hijacked stack,
never a question (liveness is the zero-length ping the harness answers).
process_signal is supervisor-or-self gated, like kill; unbound targets
accumulate a pending mask delivered on bind. timer_bind is the missing
timed wait: a one-shot deadline landing in the same replyWait as
everything else — what stop(), hello deadlines, and restart backoff are
built from. runtime.service.run folds requests, signals, and
notifications into callbacks; the VFS conversion deletes its hand-rolled
loop and gains the whole lifecycle contract. The signals scenario drives
ping, reload, terminate->exited, the timer, and the deaf-child
deadline->killed path from ring 3. docs/process-lifecycle.md increments
1-4 are now as-built.
The kernel records an ExitReason at all three death sites — clean exit,
fault (classified by vector), and process_kill — into a bounded ring
before the exit notification posts, so a supervisor's query never races
the notice. process_exit_reason is gated by the same supervisor check as
kill; runtime.process.exitReason is the stable interface. This is the
input restart policy reads (docs/process-lifecycle.md iron rule 2).
process_enumerate snapshots the task table (the device_enumerate shape, so
ps is a user program); system_spawn returns the child id, records the caller
as supervisor, and takes an exit endpoint; process_kill is allowed only for
the supervisor. Every death — exit, fault, or kill — posts a child-exit badge
to that endpoint (the IRQ-as-IPC pattern as SIGCHLD). A target caught off-CPU
is reaped in place; a running one is condemned and finished at its next
system call or tick, guarded so teardown never lands mid-kernel-operation.
Tested by process-list, process-kill, and supervision (a ring-3 supervisor
exercising the whole surface); design notes in docs/process-management.md.
Daniel Samson