danos/docs/os-development/device-authority.md

Device authority: you hold what you were given

Design for phase 2 of the bounds track, 2026-08-08. Supersedes an earlier draft that argued for capabilities on aesthetic grounds; this one starts from the hole and from the project's principles.

The hole

device_claim(id) checks two things (devices-broker.zig):

pub fn claim(id: u64, owner: u32) ClaimError!void {
    if (id >= count) return error.NoSuchDevice;
    if (claimed[@intCast(id)] != null) return error.AlreadyClaimed;
    claimed[@intCast(id)] = owner;
}

Does it exist, and is it free. Any process may claim any unclaimed device.

The matching is real but it is entirely advisory: device-manager reads devices.csv, matches a device to a driver, and spawns that driver with the device id as argv[1] (spawnDriver). The driver parses the string and claims it. Nothing anywhere binds the manager's decision to the kernel's grant — a process can pass any integer and win the race.

A claim is not a small thing. It is what gates mmio_map and irq_bind, so it is a licence to map physical memory and receive interrupts.

What this costs, beyond the obvious

maximum_children_per_parent = 16 exists because a driver that claimed one device could loop device_register under it and exhaust the shared table. That threat only exists because claiming is unauthenticated — and the cap is a poor defence against it, since an attacker can burn 16 slots, claim another device, and burn 16 more. What it reliably does instead is refuse a legitimate PCI bus with more than 16 functions, which is how an AMD Ryzen came to boot with no USB and no storage.

So the cap is not merely mis-sized. It is standing in for an authorisation that is not performed, and it punishes correct behaviour while barely inconveniencing incorrect behaviour. Closing the hole is what retires the constant, not a bigger number.

What the principles decide

• Move as much responsibility as possible to user space (3), and what remains in the kernel is there for security or a hardware limitation (5).

Deciding which driver gets which device is policy: it reads a CSV, matches identity triples, and picks a binary. That is the device manager's, and it stays there.

Enforcing that a driver holds only what it was given is security — it is the gate in front of mapping physical memory. That stays in the kernel, and it is the whole of what the kernel needs to do.

The kernel therefore does not need to know about matching, devices.csv, driver names, or why a device was assigned. It needs to know that an authority it can verify granted this device to this task.

The awkward fact that decides the mechanism

Five of the six claimants are device-manager children, spawned with their device id in argv[1]: pci-bus, usb-xhci-bus, ps2-bus, virtio-gpu, acpi.

display is not. It is spawned by init from init.csv, and it finds its device by enumerating the table for a display-class node and claiming whatever it finds (backend.zig). There is no assignment to enforce, because nobody assigned it anything.

That rules out the cheapest design. "The kernel records the device named at spawn, and device_claim checks it" closes the hole for five claimants and breaks the sixth. And the sixth is not an oddity to special-case — it is the one that shows the model is wrong: authority should be delegable, not welded to the moment of spawn.

The design

A device grant is a capability, delegated from a holder. The mechanism already exists: callCap passes a handle over an IPC call and the kernel installs it in the receiver's table (library/kernel/ipc.zig), which is how shared memory and DMA regions already move between processes.

1. Root. At boot the kernel mints grants for the devices firmware discovery found and hands them to init (PID 1, which the kernel spawns and therefore need not authenticate). This is the only place device authority enters the system, and it comes from ACPI rather than from anyone's say-so.
2. Delegation. init passes the device manager the grants it will need — in practice all of them — and passes display the framebuffer grant, because init is what starts display. This is the same shape as the /protocol registry, where init is already the grantor and protocol.csv already records /system/services/device-manager, /system/services/init, bind, device-manager.
3. Assignment. The manager passes a driver its device when it spawns it, over the channel that already exists — the driver hellos the manager, and the reply carries the grant.
4. Use. mmio_map, irq_bind, msi_bind, io_read/io_write and dma_bind check possession of the grant instead of consulting an ownership table.

Exclusivity stops being a broker refusing a second claimant and becomes the ordinary property of a capability: only one process was given it.

maximum_children_per_parent is deleted here. After this a bus driver's children are devices it enumerated on a bus it was actually given, and the threat the cap was written for no longer exists.

What this costs

Bring-up order changes. pci-bus today claims first and says hello afterwards — its own comment says "Claim the bridge, map the ECAM, hello the manager, then scan." Under delegation the hello must come first, because that is where the grant arrives. Five drivers need that reordering, and it is the bulk of the work.

init grows a device role. It already registers /protocol and reads protocol.csv; it would also hold root device grants and hand them on. That is more responsibility in PID 1, which is a cost worth naming — though the alternative is the kernel deciding who may hold what, which principle 5 excludes.

A configuration question follows. /protocol grants are data (protocol.csv), because who may speak to whom is policy. Device grants could be too — a manifest saying which binary may be given which device class. That would be the natural symmetry, and it is not proposed here: init handing the manager everything and the manager matching by devices.csv is the smaller step, and the manifest can follow if it earns itself.

What it does not solve

• Hot-unplug and re-enumeration drift. Still the inventory problem (phase 3, and open question 4 in the track plan). A grant dying with its holder is not the same as a device going away.
• The device table's size. maximum_devices is untouched by this; it goes when the inventory moves in phase 3.
• Two processes racing for the same root grant. Cannot arise, because roots are minted to init alone.

How this is verified

The invariant is I3 from the track plan: a process holds what it was handed and cannot name its way into holding more. The test is adversarial and the suite has never had one of these for devices: a process that was granted nothing calls device_claim on a device another driver owns, and on one nobody owns, and is refused both times with its own errno. The audit's lesson was that "the suite contains no attacker"; this is the attacker for devices.