Commit Graph
8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 da91a36d92 D4: the machine makes directories too
mkdir and rmdir are the machine's own now, and a file goes where its path says
rather than always in the root. A disk can be organised without the host tool
touching it.

Everything below the surface works in terms of a directory and a name rather
than a path. sbfsWalkParent splits the last name off, walks the rest, and hands
back the two - and the separator stays on the end of the head, which is what
makes one rule cover every kind of path: "/x" leaves "/", which is the root;
"x" leaves nothing, which is where the machine already is; and "A/x" leaves
"A/", which is neither and needs no special case to say so.

Saving works in those two as well, and had to. The careful order a save uses -
make a temporary, write it, delete the original, rename the temporary - only
works if the temporary is made in the SAME directory as the file, because the
rename at the end changes a name and does not move anything. Renaming to a path
naming a different directory is refused for that reason, rather than quietly
being a lie the disk goes along with.

Three things this cost, all found by running it:

mkdir Apps/Deep made /Apps/Apps. The leaf was worked out into SbfsWanted and
then the head was walked - and walking goes through sbfsPathNext, which puts
every name it meets into SbfsWanted on the way past. The head's last name
landed exactly where the leaf was. It has somewhere of its own now.

rmdir took a directory with something still in it, which is the one failure the
whole design is arranged to prevent. Looking for children clobbered DP2 and
rebuilt it from the buffer and the entry count with the subtraction the wrong
way round, so the pointer walked off the end of the block and found nothing.
The comparison goes through a CALL now, like the two beside it, and DP2 comes
back on the entry because a RET puts it there. SplitDisk's "in use but not
reachable from the root" line is what caught it.

Refusing a name longer than twenty two used to read the twenty third character
of a shorter one, which is somebody else's string. It is measured now.

Tests/agree.sh is new and is the gate this rung was for: the same disk built
twice, once with SplitDisk and once with CosmOS, compared byte for byte. The
two share no code and only a written specification, and every field one writes
and the other only reads is checked there and nowhere else - which entry a
thing lands in, which block, what a directory's unused fields hold, the
version, the free count. It caught a wrong parent immediately when that was
broken on purpose.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 09:18:29 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 36ce9f6ccf D3: the machine knows where it is
cd moves it, dir lists the directory it is in, and the prompt says which one -
but only when that is not the root, so a machine nobody has moved about on
looks exactly as it always did and every recorded test that never says "cd"
keeps its recorded prompt.

A path beginning with a separator is measured from the root and anything else
from where the machine is, so a bare name means a file in the current
directory. NO PROGRAM HAD TO BE TOLD: the working directory lives in sbfs.asm
beside the thing that resolves paths, because it is what a relative path MEANS.
Keeping it in the shell would have meant either handing it down on every call
or pasting it onto the front of every name, and the second of those is how a
name that is already absolute gets ruined.

Nothing stores the path. The working directory is an entry index and two bytes,
and the text on the prompt is built each time by walking the chain of parents
upward, writing names from the end of a buffer towards the front - which is the
order they arrive in, and saves reversing them afterwards.

sbfsFind splits into a walk and a check. "cd /" and "cd .." both end at the
root quite legitimately, and had no way to say so through a routine whose only
word for the root was "missing".

Typing a program's name now tries two places in order: where you are, then
/Apps. The first makes a program you are working on the one that runs; the
second lets Snake work from anywhere. A word already beginning with a separator
has said where to look, so only that place is tried.

osChangeDir exists so that "a program may move about, and the shell puts the
working directory back" is a thing that can happen rather than a promise about
nothing. Both halves of that were unfalsifiable without it: with no way for a
program to move, removing the restore changed no test. Wander is the program
that moves - it goes where it is told and reads a file there by a bare name -
and with it on the disk, removing the restore fails.

The remembered file is dropped whenever what a relative path means changes: a
cd, a program calling osChangeDir, a program exiting. Removing all of them
fails the test and removing any one of them does not, because today every path
into that cache belongs to a program that exits. It is kept in all three
because the cost is a call and the failure is a file's blocks being handed out
under another file's name.

The cwd fixture holds two files called notes.txt saying different things, and a
Say.sbx in /A that is really hello. Two copies of one program, or two copies of
one file, would have passed with the whole of this deleted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 22:22:45 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 36a1b07b5b D2: the machine walks a path
sbfsFind takes a path where it used to take a name: names with '/' between
them, walked from the root, with '.' and '..'. Each name is looked for among
the entries whose parent is where the walk has got to. A bare name is a path of
one name, so everything written before directories existed still works and
still costs one walk of the directory.

sbfsMount takes either version. On a version one disk every entry has zeroes
where a parent goes and the walk starts at zero, so the comparison always
agrees - which is how a flat disk reads correctly here with nothing done to it.

PROGRAMS DID NOT HAVE TO BE TAUGHT ANY OF THIS. Resolution sits inside
sbfsFind, below the services, so every osFile call keeps its signature and a
path is simply a longer name. Type, More, Edit and the assembler gained
subdirectories without a line changing in any of them.

Four things this turned up, none of which was the path walk:

load copied the path into a buffer sized for a NAME, so anything over 22
characters was cut short - and cut short into a path that often still resolved.
"/Apps/Deep/../../Apps/Say.sbx" became "/Apps/Deep/../../Apps/" and reported
that the program was a directory. That is the whole of what looked like a bug
in '..', and it cost most of the time here.

load on a directory SUCCEEDED. A directory has no blocks, so reading it reads
nothing and leaves the staging area holding whatever was staged last - which,
if that was a program, still says SBEX and still has a working entry address.
It handed back the program before it. Refused outright now.

delete and rename on a directory are refused, and save refuses one up front
rather than failing at the rename and leaving a temporary behind. Deleting a
directory frees an entry index, and a parent IS an index, so the next file
created would take it and inherit the children.

create writes the parent rather than leaving it zero by luck. It would be zero
- delete wipes all thirty two bytes and a fresh entry never had any - but that
is a fact about two other routines, and a file appearing inside a directory it
was never put in is not a failure anybody would think to look for.

dir marks directories and counts them apart from files, because at this point
it was calling them files of no bytes.

Two hazards written down in the design note turned out not to be real, and both
were checked rather than argued about:

The lookup cache holding 22 bytes of a longer path cannot hand back the wrong
file - textSame wants both strings to end in the same place, so a cut down
entry misses. It can never HIT either, though, so every path longer than a name
went to the disk every time; it holds a whole path now.

The allocator stepping over directories changes nothing any test can see. A
directory has no start as well as no blocks, so its bounds are nought to nought
and no candidate begins before it ends. The four instructions stay, with a
comment saying they are not load bearing today and why they are there anyway.

makedisks.sh resolves its build path before it cds. Given a relative one it
carried on and quietly built disks missing some of their files, which is how
the tree fixture lost a file and sent me looking for a bug in '..'.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 19:08:26 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 4fd8bf7b3f Step a Data Pointer with INCD and DECD, not DPUP and DPDN by one
DPUP takes an immediate, so an offset of one is legal and does exactly the
right thing. It is also three bytes where INCD is two, and reads as "offset
the pointer up by one" where INCD reads as "step the pointer".

56 of them across 15 files: the system, the assembler, the editor, and eight
test programs. CosmOS is 9,564 bytes to 9,537, the native assembler 11,648
to 11,635, and every program in the repository together 49 bytes lighter.

The worst offender was numbers.asm, written this week, where every sixteen
bit helper reaches the low byte and comes back the long way round. It is the
file every other part of the assembler includes, so it is the first thing
anybody reads when they go looking - and it was teaching them the long way.
Pattern matched off sbfs.asm rather than off the instruction table I had
just embedded in two programs.

THIS IS NOT TWO WAYS TO DO ONE THING. DPUP takes an arbitrary number, so one
is inevitably among them; INCD earns its place by making the common case a
byte cheaper. The overlap is structural and the choice is a usage question,
which is a linter's job rather than an ISA's - "DPUP.n 0d01: INCD.n does
this in a byte less" is a mechanical rule with no judgement in it.

Nothing needed re-recording, which was not a foregone conclusion: cosmosBreak
prints the system addresses the registers happened to hold, and they did not
move. Both assemblers still produce identical bytes and CosmOS still builds
itself to a fixed point.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-21 18:16:27 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3d2ab34229 Streaming: read a file bigger than the machine's memory
osFileRead hands over a whole file, which settles anything under 64K and
settles nothing above it. CosmOS's own source is above it - the sources
together are 104K against 64K of Data Memory - so a machine that is going
to assemble itself needs another way to ask.

osFileInfo (0d26) says how many blocks a file occupies. osFileBlock (0d27)
hands over one of them and says how many of its bytes belong to the file.
Between them a program reads a file of any size through a buffer of 256.

Blocks rather than bytes from osFileInfo is forced, not chosen: a file on a
sixteen megabyte disk is up to twenty four bits long and a pointer holds
sixteen. osFileBlock's count answers in DP3 for the same kind of reason -
a whole block is 256 bytes, which does not fit in a register, and a count
that reported it as zero would make every reader special-case the end.

Nothing is kept open. Every call names the file, so there is no handle to
leak and nothing left behind by a program that stops halfway. Taken at its
word that means searching the directory once per block, so the system
remembers where the last file it was asked about lives; every path that can
change what a name means calls fileForget, including the shell's own delete
and rename, which do not go through the services. Correctness never depends
on the cache - a cache thrown away is indistinguishable from one never
filled. Measured on a 329 block file: 7% of the run saved when the file is
the first directory entry, 11% when it is the sixteenth.

These two say WHY when the answer is no, which the others do not. Elsewhere
the only useful response to a failure is to give up, so one value suffices.
These are asked questions, and running off the end is how a reader learns it
has finished, so it gets an answer of its own: 1 no disk, 2 no such file,
3 past the end, 4 the disk refused.

Apps/Stream.asm reads an 84,000 byte file through 256 bytes. The check that
matters is the second one: a small file read BOTH ways - whole with
osFileRead and streamed - with the two checksums compared, so streaming is
measured against the path already known to work rather than against a number
someone wrote down. The checksum is Fletcher's rather than a sum, because a
sum is the same whatever order the bytes arrived in and the order is exactly
what streaming has to get right. Both checksums were also confirmed against
the same arithmetic run on the host.

The rest of the test is the cache: two files read alternately catch a memory
that missed the name changing, and a rename catches one that missed the file
moving - and that one would otherwise pass, since the blocks are still there
holding the same bytes.

The test file is generated rather than taken from the repository. The CosmOS
sources would be a truer picture and would move the recorded checksum every
time a line of CosmOS was edited, putting a real difference in a crowd of
meaningless ones - the same trap the cycle counts used to set.

cosmosBreak's recorded output moves by two bytes in two pointers: SbfsIndex
added two bytes to the filesystem's data and Break prints the system
addresses the registers happened to hold.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-20 21:19:36 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 301716e869 sbfs: give sbfsMatchEntry a counter of its own
sbfsFind counts a block's eight entries in SbfsCount and calls
sbfsMatchEntry for each one, and sbfsMatchEntry used the same variable for
its own twenty two byte comparison. A name differing at its first byte
returned without decrementing, leaving 22 in the entry counter, so the
search then walked twenty two entries through a buffer holding eight: off
the end of it, into whatever data happened to follow, matching against
rubbish and reporting a file that is not there as found.

It had always been there. What decided whether it looked like it worked
was the bytes after SbfsBuffer, so it stayed hidden until unrelated data
was added and changed them. It showed up as "dir" followed by any failed
"load" reporting that the file could not be read rather than that it does
not exist.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 18:18:12 -04:00
Anachronaut e3100b4718 Fixed assembler bug that caused crash on IR array resize. Added line editor app. 2026-08-17 23:26:21 -04:00
Anachronaut 91c9d49d1b CosmOS pre-alpha and launchable application versions of old programs. 2026-08-17 15:31:49 -04:00