The loader marks the superblock before it hands over and the system clears
the mark when it reaches its prompt, so a system that crashes on the way
there leaves it set. The loader finding it still set next time is how a
machine that will not start says so to the only thing in a position to do
anything about it. Without that, pointing boot.cfg at something that dies
before the shell is a machine that can never be told anything again - the
shell is the only way to change the file, and the file is what stops the
shell from starting.
Three states rather than two, and the third is the one worth having:
0 settled the last start arrived; use the configuration
1 trying handed over, and nothing came back to say it got there
2 fell back a try failed and the fallback was used, until settled
With only 0 and 1 the machine alternates for ever: fall back, reach a
prompt, clear the mark, retry the broken system, crash, fall back. State 2
stops that. A system known not to start is not tried again until somebody
says the situation has changed.
REACHING THE PROMPT IS A DELIBERATE THRESHOLD. It is not a claim that the
system works - a shell can be reached by something broken in every other
way. It is the point where a person can type, which is exactly what the
fallback exists to give back: anything wrong past there is fixable from the
prompt and nothing wrong before it is fixable at all.
The routines live in sbfs.asm because both the loader and the system read
and write this byte, and two pieces of code with their own idea of where a
byte lives is what this format has two implementations and a byte for byte
comparison to avoid.
And the trap this system documents in its own manual caught me anyway: the
first version handed the state back in A, which CALL restores, so every
read got whatever the caller happened to be holding. It comes back in
memory now, and the comment says why.
Three disks differing only in the state on them, so the tests read as three
consecutive starts of one machine while none depends on another running.
Anachronaut
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