danos/docs/device-driver-development/ipc.md

IPC: the kernel-ipc transport

Inter-process communication is the backbone of a microkernel. Once drivers and services run isolated in their own address spaces (vision), they can't just call each other — a request becomes bytes on a wire. In a microkernel, whatever was a function call across a monolithic kernel is IPC, so it's a first-class concern, not an afterthought.

This document describes one transport — the bottom layer (L0) of the communication stack defined in communication.md, which owns the model and the vocabulary (protocol, channel, packet, signal, endpoint). kernel-ipc is the first transport, not the only possible one: in buffer-plus-doorbell terms it is a kernel-owned mailbox with the scheduler as the doorbell. Its distinguishing properties, which the layers above may rely on where they say so:

• Rendezvous. A call is a synchronous meeting, copied sender-page to receiver-page — natural backpressure, no queue to size.
• Capability carriage. The only transport that can move a handle between processes. Channels are therefore always established over kernel-ipc, and it remains every channel's control path even when bulk data is negotiated onto a fatter transport (a shared-memory ring).
• Verified source. Every delivery carries the kernel-stamped badge — the identity the channel layer attaches to received packets.
• Bounded packets. 256 bytes call/reply, 64 pushed — the floor every protocol may assume on any transport.

Three properties keep the networking analogy honest — kernel-ipc is networking-shaped, not TCP:

• Channels over it are RPC-shaped, not streams. Packets, call/reply, datagram pushes — closer to UDP plus RPC than to a byte stream. Ordering exists per exchange (a reply answers its call), not across a channel.
• Possession is the connection. There is no handshake state in the kernel: holding the capability is having the channel. A provider's one endpoint terminates every client's channel at once, demultiplexed by badge — like every client sharing the server's listening socket, with per-connection state living in the provider, keyed by badge. A private channel (a dedicated endpoint pair) is built when wanted: that is exactly what subscribe does.
• Packets never fragment. If it doesn't fit in a packet, it isn't a packet: bulk data lives in shared memory and a packet (or signal) is the doorbell. The display path already works this way.

The rest of this document is the implementation, bottom-up: the kernel-thread queue the blocking discipline was worked out on, then endpoints — this transport's termination points.

The kernel-thread queue

The first form is a bounded blocking queue (system/kernel/ipc.zig): a fixed-size ring buffer of messages with a producer/consumer rendezvous, built on the scheduler's wait queues. (Its type is still named Channel(T, capacity) — it predates the vocabulary above, and is a queue between kernel threads in one address space, not a channel in the model's sense; a rename can ride a later flag-day.)

Channel(T, capacity) is generic over the message type and buffer size. It holds a ring buffer, a count, and two wait queues:

• send(msg) — if the queue is full, block on the not-full queue; otherwise write the message, bump the count, and wake a waiting receiver.
• receive() — if the queue is empty, block on the not-empty queue; otherwise take a message, drop the count, and wake a waiting sender.

Neither side busy-waits: a full queue parks the sender, an empty one parks the receiver, and each operation wakes the other side when it makes progress possible.

Two details make it correct:

• Recheck in a loop. A woken task re-tests the condition (while (full) wait) rather than assuming the slot is still available — another waiter may have taken it first. This is the standard guard against spurious or racing wakeups.
• One critical section. send/receive run under the big kernel lock (sync.enter / sync.leave), which disables interrupts on this core and takes the kernel's one spinlock — since SMP, the interrupt flag alone is not atomicity, because cli on one core does nothing to another. So checking the condition and committing the block/enqueue happen atomically both with respect to the timer preempting mid-operation and to the other side running on another CPU. waitLocked / wakeLocked are the variants that assume the caller already holds that critical section.

Verifying it

The ipc test (see testing.md) runs a producer and a consumer passing 100 messages through a 4-slot queue. The small buffer means the queue goes full and empty over and over, so both the blocking-send and blocking-receive paths are exercised heavily. The messages arrive intact and in order (their sum is the expected 5050), and neither task busy-waits — they block and wake each other.

Endpoints: the termination points

A queue connects two kernel threads sharing one address space. Real providers are processes, so a packet has to cross an address-space boundary. That's system/kernel/ipc-synchronous.zig, and its shape is L4's: a synchronous rendezvous at an Endpoint, with the packet copied directly from the sender's pages to the receiver's (copyAcross walks both sets of page tables through the physmap — no CR3 switch, no bounce buffer).

Two syscalls carry the request/reply exchange:

• ipc_call(h, msg, reply) — copy the request packet to the provider, block until the reply packet comes back.
• ipc_reply_wait(h, reply, recv) — reply to the client you're still holding (if any), then block for the next request. One syscall, because a provider's steady state is always "finish the last one, wait for the next".

An endpoint is reached by handle — a small integer index into the process's handle table (Task.handles), exactly like a file descriptor, and just as unforgeable. The provider never learns the client's identity beyond the badge delivered alongside each packet: the caller's task id, stamped by the kernel — unforgeable source addressing, a property a network's source field lacks.

The bootstrap problem — how a channel is first established — is the subject of protocol-namespace.md: a protocol is resolved by name and the channel arrives as a capability. (The mechanism this replaces, ipc_register/ipc_lookup under compile-time ServiceId integers, is retired by that design.)

Interrupts are signals

notifyFromIsr posts an asynchronous signal to an endpoint — no payload, no reply owed — and wakes whoever is blocked in reply_wait. Its badge has the top bit set (notify_badge_bit), which is how a driver's single event loop distinguishes "a client wants something" from "the hardware wants something". Signals sit in a small coalescing ring on the endpoint, so an interrupt taken while the driver was busy elsewhere is not lost — coalesced, never dropped, which is exactly a signal's contract (the count may collapse; the fact may not).

This is what makes a user-space driver possible at all, and it's the subject of drivers.md.

What's next (partly done since)

• Priority inheritance through IPC — still open: a high-priority client blocked on a low-priority provider suffers unbounded priority inversion.
• Handle transfer. Landed as cap-passing (M13): ipc_call and ipc_reply_wait carry an optional capability alongside the bytes (send_cap), copying an endpoint or shared-memory handle into the peer's table — the mechanism by which channels are established and private channels built. First user: input subscribers register by handing over their own endpoint, and class drivers get a private channel to one device.
• Asynchronous / buffered send for the cases where a rendezvous is the wrong shape (logging, event fan-out). Landed as ipc_send — a non-blocking post of an event packet (≤ 64 bytes) to an endpoint's bounded queue, delivered through reply_wait (badge bit notify_message_bit). Built for, and first used by, the input service's keyboard-event broadcast, where a synchronous push would let one dead subscriber hang the fan-out. A full queue drops the oldest — event packets are droppable by design (protocol-namespace.md's wiring section states the rule).
• A bounded reply — half landed. The copy is still one packet (256 bytes) under the big kernel lock, but bulk transfer got its shared pages: shared_memory_create/map/physical, the region handle delegated as a capability (above) — the packets-never-fragment rule in practice. virtio-gpu's scanout surface is the first user (display-v2.md).

Lifecycle conventions over IPC (M17)

Three conventions from process-lifecycle.md ride the signal mechanism:

• Process signals arrive as endpoint signals on the endpoint a process nominated with signal_bind (process.bindSignals): badge = the signal bit plus the coalesced pending mask (process.signalsFrom decodes). Statements, never questions; no payload, no reply.
• One-shot timers (timer_bind, time.timerOnce) land as a timer-bit signal — the timed wait: a service arms a deadline and keeps serving, instead of blocking in sleep.
• The universal ping: a zero-length request is the liveness probe, answered with a zero-length reply by the service harness itself (service.run). No protocol's requests start at length zero, so the encoding cannot collide, and a wedged service simply fails to answer — which is the diagnosis. Deep health ("can I reach my hardware?") stays a per-service protocol packet.