posix subsystem

This part of the Handbook is Work-In-Progress.

The posix subsystem is the core of Managarm's userspace. It is started by thor and handles all posix requests made by userspace programs, like file I/O, memory allocation and sockets. It also implements various Linux API's like epollfd, signalfd, timerfd and inotify. For file I/O on block devices, it communicates with libblockfs, which is responsible for the actual file I/O on ext2 file systems.

On startup, the subsystem runs posix-init, which is a two stage init responsible for bringing up the userland. Thus, posix-init does the following operations:

• Starting of several servers for storage, this includes the USB host controller drivers (ehci, uhci and xhci) and the block devices (virtio-block and ata).
• Mounting of the root (/) file system and the various pseudo file systems (procfs, sysfs, devtmpfs, tmpfs and devpts) and entering it via chroot.
• Executing stage 2, which brings up the rest of the userspace

In stage 2, the following operations take place

• Starting of udevd, which is responsible for populating /dev and starting of other servers via udev rules.
• Starting of drivers that are not yet integrated in udev rules.
• Ensuring that the Direct Rendering Manager (drm), keyboard and mouse are available.
• Parsing the kernel command line for hints on what userspace program to run.
• Populating the environment with essential variables.
• Either launching weston with XWayland support, sway or kmscon, as requested.

Afterwards, init goes to sleep and the userspace is operational.

The code for the posix subsystem can be found at https://github.com/managarm/managarm/tree/master/posix/subsystem, while the code for posix-init can be found at https://github.com/managarm/managarm/tree/master/posix/init.