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.
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 protocol is now defined through envelope.Define rather than beside it.
Every packet begins with the same 16-byte prefix: a Header of {operation,
target} for a request or event, a Status for a reply. The header is folded
into each protocol's own layout, never stacked on top of it — Define walks
a spec's types and refuses one that carries a Header or Status field, so
the rule cannot be missed by reading. Operations number from 16, leaving
describe, enumerate, subscribe and unsubscribe reserved and answerable the
same way everywhere; describe the envelope answers itself, and an unknown
verb is -ENOSYS without a provider writing a line.
The size floor becomes something protocols can compile against: 256 bytes
for a call, 64 for a push, matching the kernel's own limits, checked at the
Define call with the prefix counted in. A protocol that outgrows either
fails the build with the reason and the remedy — shrink, or move the bulk
to shared memory, because packets never fragment. Events carry the header
too and number in their own space, so appending an operation can never
renumber a shipped event.
Beside it, the client half of the model: a Channel is what opening a
/protocol name yields, wrapping the endpoint capability so a program holds
a conversation rather than a handle. Nothing speaks through either yet —
the vfs protocol gains NodeKind.protocol and the convention that an open
reply may carry a capability, and that is the whole runtime change.
Suite 107/107, unchanged: P1 converts 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.
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.
Each library domain (kernel, device, client, protocol, csv,
xkeyboard-config) now owns a build.zig + build.zig.zon that wires and
exports its modules, with a standalone `zig build test` per domain.
The kernel package also exports abi (source stays in system/abi.zig) so
every consumer names one module instance. The root build swaps its
createModule calls for b.dependency(...).module(...) — no binary moves;
the root is the pilot consumer (docs/build-packages-plan.md). Path
dependencies deduplicate by resolved location, so the diamond
(root -> device -> kernel, root -> kernel) yields a single instance of
each module. Boot-image file list unchanged.
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).
With every consumer migrated (C2), nothing imports `runtime` or `system` any
longer. Removed both shim files and their build.zig module definitions, dropped
the `runtime` entry from `default_imports`, and rewrote the per-binary root shim
(library/kernel/root.zig) to import `start` (_start + panic) and `logging`
(std_options) directly instead of through `runtime`.
addUserBinary/addThreadedUserBinary/addUserBinaryImpl lose their `runtime_module`
parameter; the root module now pulls the two modules it needs out of
`default_imports` via a small findImport helper.
The runtime dumping ground is gone: the userspace library is library/kernel
(concern modules), library/device (driver/pci/usb/block/model/mmio/acpi data),
library/client (display, input service clients), and library/protocol (wire
contracts). Consumers @import concern modules by name.
Verified: zig build, zig build test, and QEMU (smoke, thread-spawn, thread-mutex,
logger, display-native, device-manager, usb-storage, input).
The one giant `runtime` module (with a `system.zig` that was itself a dumping
ground of unrelated syscalls) is split into directly-importable, flat concern
modules under library/kernel/:
system-call ipc memory process thread time logging file-system service start
(+ the device/service clients: device, device-manager, block, display, input)
system.zig is dissolved — its functions moved to their concern home (mmap ->
memory, spawn/kill/exit -> process, sleep/clock -> time, write/klog -> logging,
fs* -> file-system). `memory` merges heap+dma+shared-memory behind one flat API
(memory.allocator/dmaAlloc/sharedCreate/mmap), keeping heap's state and malloc
export single. The memory<->thread dependency cycle (heap needs Thread.Mutex,
thread needs mmap) is broken by having thread allocate its own stack via the raw
mmap syscall, so the module graph is a DAG.
This is the atomic step: all 42 internal cross-imports flip from relative to
module imports at once. `runtime.zig` and `system.zig` become thin re-export
SHIMS so the ~38 consumers keep compiling on `runtime.*` untouched; they migrate
to direct imports in C2, after which the shims are deleted (C5).
zig build + zig build test green; 14 QEMU cases pass (smoke, process,
process-kill, thread-spawn/join, logger, vfs, fat-mount, display-native,
usb-storage, virtio-gpu, device-manager, input, power-button).
First step of splitting the runtime dumping ground. Pure directory rename
(git mv library/runtime library/kernel) + the six build.zig path references
repointed. The module is still named "runtime" for now; the next commits split
it into concern modules (ipc, memory, process, time, logging, file-system, ...),
dissolve system.zig, and delete the runtime aggregator.
The library/kernel name follows the kernel32 model: it is the userspace library
that wraps the private kernel ABI, distinct from system/kernel/ (the kernel).
zig build green.
Daniel Samson