cb30faf15f
SYSRETQ with a non-canonical RIP raises a general protection fault in ring 0 — on the kernel stack, an instruction after the swapgs that installed the user's GS base. It is one of the better-known escalation primitives, and ring 3 reaches it without any kernel bug at all: the processor saves the address of the instruction after SYSCALL, so a program whose SYSCALL is the last two bytes of the last canonical page returns to the first non-canonical address. The new test does exactly that. The exit path now sign-extends the return address from bit 47 and compares; if the value changed, it returns through IRETQ instead, which commits the privilege change before fetching the new address, so the fault arrives from ring 3 and the process dies like any other. Four register-only operations and a branch that a correct program can never take — it could not have executed at a non-canonical address in the first place. Bit 47 is the right pivot because danos builds four-level page tables and nothing sets the five-level bit; a future port must move the pivot, and the comment says so. SFMASK grows one bit while we are here. SYSCALL, unlike an interrupt gate, does not clear the nested-task flag, so the kernel had been running every system call with whatever ring 3 last chose — harmless while the only exit was SYSRETQ, and a question worth not having now that one exit is IRETQ. The kernel is never nested; ring 3 still gets its own flag back. Suite 113/113. The new case asserts the refusal counter rather than the dying process: the emulator we test on kills it either way, so only the counter distinguishes a guard that ran from one that did not. |
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| .. | ||
| README.MD | ||
| acpi.md | ||
| architecture.md | ||
| arm.md | ||
| communication.md | ||
| discovery.md | ||
| efi.md | ||
| frame-allocator.md | ||
| framebuffer.md | ||
| gop.md | ||
| halting.md | ||
| heap.md | ||
| interrupts.md | ||
| logging.md | ||
| memory-map.md | ||
| paging.md | ||
| power.md | ||
| process-lifecycle.md | ||
| process-management.md | ||
| protocol-namespace.md | ||
| release-iso.md | ||
| resilience.md | ||
| scheduling.md | ||
| shared-fate-plan.md | ||
| smep-smap.md | ||
| smp.md | ||
| syscall.md | ||
| system-image.md | ||
| sysv.md | ||
| threading-plan.md | ||
| threading.md | ||
| timers.md | ||
| vdso.md | ||
README.MD
OS Development
This document explains the architectural decisions behind the operating system.
Written in Zig?
The OS is written in Zig because it has excellent EFI support, so the OS boots quickly without a third-party bootloader.
Zig comes batteries included for systems work — cross-compilation, a build system, and a test runner are all part of the toolchain. Building with -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe keeps runtime safety checks on in the shipped kernel, which removes entire classes of bugs. The built-in test suite, combined with a QEMU integration harness, means every feature is proven to work, before it is shipped.
The codebase of the OS prioritizes readability. The aim is a codebase where someone new to OS development can find their way around without a guide.
A microkernel?
The kernel is a thin layer: it schedules processes and manages memory. Everything else — drivers, file systems, the display — runs in user space as separate, isolated processes.
The payoff is resilience. When a driver crashes, it doesn't take the OS down with it; it gets restarted. That makes this an ideal environment for developing an operating system, because a buggy driver is an ordinary bug: patch it, restart the service, and keep going.
There is a security benefit too. Processes are isolated and talk over Inter-Process Communication (IPC) channels, so compromising one service doesn't hand an attacker the whole machine. Vulnerabilities tend to stay contained in the process they started in.
Other operating systems choose to pack all of these duties into one binary as a Monolithic kernel, mostly for performance: a function call inside the kernel is faster than passing a message between isolated processes. That cost is real — an IPC round-trip is a few microseconds where a function call is nanoseconds — but it is also workload-shaped. Compute-bound programs don't notice it at all. For bulk data like file contents and pixels, the design moves data through shared memory and DMA so it is copied once, the same as a monolithic kernel; only small control messages cross the IPC boundary. What remains is the per-message cost on chatty paths, and the scheduler and memory management are designed to keep that small.
Private ABI
The syscall layer is private. The numbers and structures in abi.zig are an internal detail shared between the kernel and the system's own libraries, and they are free to change between builds.
The public boundary sits one level up: the vDSO that programs call into, and the documented IPC protocols such as the VFS protocol. Programs that stick to those interfaces keep working while the kernel rearranges itself underneath. This is the opposite of the Linux approach, where raw syscall numbers are frozen forever; here, stability is promised at the library and protocol level, and nowhere below it.
Steal the best bits and dump the legacy
The OS is Unix-like, but selectively. It borrows the ideas that have aged well — everything is a file, small services composed over clean interfaces — and skips the parts of POSIX that have caused decades of headaches.
Some concrete choices:
spawn, notfork. Creating a process starts a fresh program and returns the child's id. There is no clone-the-whole-address-space-then-immediately-throw-it-away dance, and none of the subtle state-inheritance bugs that come with it.- Time is a syscall. The kernel owns the clock and timers directly. There is no time daemon to keep alive and no ambiguity about where the truth lives.
- Lifecycle events arrive as messages. A supervisor learns that a child exited through an IPC message on an endpoint it already owns — delivered like any other message, not as an interrupt that can fire between any two instructions.
The test for keeping an idea is simple: does it still pull its weight, or is it only there because it was there in 1979?