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.
The registry consults the open rows it has been parsing since P2, so
reaching a contract now takes a grant as well as a binding. A caller
without one is answered exactly as it would be for a name nobody ever
bound: same status, same empty reply, same absent capability, byte for
byte, and no log line on either path — klog_read is ungated, so a line on
one and not the other would be the oracle the design set out to remove.
Refusal and absence being one answer is what lets a supervisor later
narrow, fake or park a child's namespace without the child learning what
it was denied.
The manifest gains a third permission for a shape the plan did not
foresee: attestation is one hop, but the driver tree is three deep — the
PS/2 keyboard and mouse are spawned by ps2-bus, which the device manager
spawned — so no row could name them and PS/2 input would simply stop.
A supervise grant lets a delegate vouch for what its children *reach*,
never for what they claim; the bind path is untouched, and the laundering
deputy is still refused.
The review found the receive side of a rule this track had already
written down. Every process holds a sendable handle to the registrar —
resolve installs one for anyone who asks — and ipc_reply_wait never asked
who owned the endpoint, so a stranger could dequeue there: take the
provider endpoints riding bind requests, and answer other clients' opens
in the registrar's name. Receiving is the owner's privilege, like binding
a signal or a timer; sending remains anyone's.
Suite 109/109.
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 /loop work list for the committed design set: Phase 0 baseline, PM
(unix-path flag-day), H1 copy discipline, P1 envelope + Channel, P2
registry + ServiceId retirement, P3 open grants, P4a-c protocol rebase,
H2 SMEP, HS sysret guard, H3 SMAP. Ten settled decisions from the
2026-07-31 grounding pass, two corrected on review: every packet carries
the envelope header folded (headerless events rejected), and bind/open
authorization is chain-attested identity (name alone rejected — ungated
spawn makes it a confused deputy). smep-smap.md gains the verified
straggler table: nine syscalls, klog_status the ninth, with the
callee-writer restructuring notes.
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.
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.
Daniel Samson