A parent is an entry index PLUS ONE in two bytes, so entry 65535 has no
parent number: adding one wraps to zero, and zero is the root. Eight
entries to a block, so 8192 directory blocks reaches it and SplitDisk
formatted that happily.
It does not fail by refusing, which is why it was worth chasing rather than
reasoning about. Reproduced on a disk built for it: mkdir /deep/child, with
/deep at entry 65535, printed 'Made "/deep/child" as entry 0' and put child
in the ROOT. Listing /deep then showed nothing, because the search is for a
parent of 65536 and the entry carries zero - so the same mkdir succeeded
again, and again, and five entries called /child piled up in the root.
Duplicate names in one directory are the one thing rename refuses outright,
on the grounds that a search answers with whichever it meets first and the
rest can never be reached; this manufactured them one per attempt.
8191 blocks is the most, giving 65528 entries. Refused when formatting and
again when reading, in both implementations, because a disk claiming more
was made by something that never checked. On the machine only the high byte
of the count has to be looked at: anything from 0x20 up is too many.
Three checks, all of which fail with their guard removed. The machine's
disk claims the size rather than having it, so the test image is 64 blocks
that lie rather than sixteen megabytes that do not - mounting is refused at
the geometry, which is read out of block 0.
Saving something that already exists writes a temporary, deletes the
original and gives the temporary its name, so that nothing is lost if the
writing fails. The temporary was told apart from a real file by being
called sbfs.part or sbfs.out - and those are legal names. Starting a save
deleted whatever answered to one as stale scratch, so saving anything at
all in a directory destroyed your own file of that name there, silently.
Flag bit 0x04 now says it. The property is not in the contents - the same
bytes become the finished file the instant the rename lands - so it belongs
in the entry, which is the thing the commit changes. sbfsCreateTempAt is
the door temporaries come in by, the commit writes the flags flat along
with the name, and cleanup wipes what it finds only if the entry says it is
ours. Anything else stops the save instead.
The bit is also the recovery. Both listings show an unfinished write rather
than sizing it, because the size in the entry is the room that was asked
for and not what was written: "<unfinished>" from dir, and a line from
SplitDisk saying the blocks are held and a rename brings the data back.
That was the gap in what the last commit documented - the data survived a
crash and nothing would show you where it was.
Four new agreement checks, three of which fail with the guards removed. The
fourth needed rebuilding first: both tests started on one disk, and the
first save ate the sbfs.part that was the second test's SOURCE, so the copy
failed for want of a file, never opened a stream, and passed while
reporting on nothing. A disk each. The fifth check forges the wreckage by
setting the flag on a finished file, since nothing here can crash a save
half way through.
No version bump: a committed file never carries the bit, so a disk this
writes is byte for byte the disk the old code wrote, which the whole-image
comparisons confirm. Only the wreckage differs, and older code reads that
as an ordinary file - which is what it did before.
SBFS version two adds directories out of space each entry had already set
aside: two of the four reserved bytes become a parent, and one of the seven
spare flag bits says an entry is a directory. The entry is still thirty two
bytes, so it still divides two hundred and fifty six and still never straddles
a block, and nothing in the block layer knows anything happened.
A directory is an entry with no blocks. That is what keeps the flat array of
entries the whole allocation map, which is the property the format is built
on: with files laid down contiguously, every block is inside some entry's
range or it is not, and an entry with no range is in nobody's way. There is
still no allocation table to consult and none to keep right.
THE PARENT IS AN INDEX PLUS ONE, so zero means the root. A version one disk has
zeroes in those bytes, and "in the root" is exactly where every file on a flat
disk is - so a version one image is already a valid version two image, with
nothing to convert and no tool to convert it with.
A disk is at the lowest version that describes what is on it. format makes a
version one disk and mkdir is what raises it, so everything built here stays
readable by a reader that has never heard of a directory right up until it
really does have one. That is what lets this land before the machine knows
anything: the whole existing suite passes untouched.
The tool gains mkdir and rmdir, and list, put, get and delete take paths. list
also now reports entries used against entries available, because a disk has two
ceilings and the entry one is the one nobody notices until it bites.
rmdir refuses a directory with anything in it, and that is not politeness:
parents are entry indices, a freed index gets handed out again, and the
children of a removed directory would reappear inside whatever took its place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
"Binary" was doing three jobs. It meant an SPBT file that the machine starts
from; it meant whatever the assembler happened to produce, which is now
either that or a loadable program; and it meant a compiled host tool. A word
that means three things means none of them, and the first of the three has a
name already - this project has been calling them boot images for a while
and the manuals had not caught up.
Where it means an SPBT file -> boot image
Where it means either output -> output
Where it means a host executable -> left alone
Where it means base two -> left alone
The user facing messages move with it:
Error: No boot image specified.
Usage: ./SplitBit [OPTIONS] <boot image>
Error: This is not a SplitBit boot image.
Error: This boot image is in format version 2, and this emulator reads 1.
Successfully wrote SplitBit boot image to "hello.bin".
The assembler's own help was the interesting case. Its -o writes either
format, so "the binary" there was never right - it is "the output" now, and
the message that names the format is the one that says which it wrote.
No recorded output contained the word, so nothing needed re-blessing.
Checked before starting rather than after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
Anachronaut
