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* One core behind N frontends, the board's own runner moved in, and every ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-27
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | board cap on one screen ## The wire is the effect stream, not a new protocol `pardes --detach` leaves a core running with no terminal; `pardes --attach` is a frontend that owns a terminal and a socket and nothing else. N frontends on one core all look at the same screen — `screen -x`, not N sessions. The codec (`src/detached/wire.zig`) carries exactly one `Event` or one `Host.VTable` call per message. That is not a coincidence and it is why there is no third vocabulary to keep in step: the core's IO seam was already a struct of function pointers with plain-data arguments, so a socket is a legal implementation of it. `nested.zig`'s socket could not be reused — it carries a builtin command line, and a command line cannot carry a frame. ARCHITECTURE-NEUTRAL on purpose, not as decoration. The frontend on the far end may be riscv32-freestanding on the ESP32-P4 while the core is x86_64 Linux, so every field is an explicit little-endian fixed width and no message is a blit of a native struct. A protocol that only works between two builds of the same compiler would have thrown away the one frontend that motivated it. ## The board comes in; its toolchain stays out `src/p4.zig` becomes `src/esp32p4.zig`, and the pardes half of `../05-zig-p4` — the vaxis-over- serial runner, the UART editor terminal, the keystroke rescue ring, the on-die test suite — moves into `src/esp32p4/`. `build.zig.zon` gains `.zig_p4 = .{ .path = "../05-zig-p4" }`, so `zig build -Dplatform=esp32p4 -Desp32p4-firmware` builds, flashes, monitors and self-tests the board from this repo's `build.zig`. The DIVISION is the point. What moved is what only pardes wants: the runner that drives a pardes core over a serial line. What stayed is everything a second project would also want — the HAL, the register/radio/oracle layers, the linker script, `_start`. `zig_p4` declares no dependencies of its own and its `build()` early-returns when it is not the root package, so this costs the package graph exactly zero packages and the editor's own builds nothing at all. ## limits.zig: nine forgettable places become one budget Nine `platform == .esp32p4` capacity tests lived in nine files. They were never nine decisions — they are ONE decision, how much memory this build may spend, taken nine times where no reader could see the total. `src/limits.zig` puts the whole budget on one screen with every cap named against what it is measured against, derived from two booleans. The payoff is testability on a machine that is not the board: the caps are ordinary comptime values, so a host build can be compiled against the board's numbers and the parking, eviction and clamping paths a 240 KiB core takes get exercised by the normal test suite instead of only over a UART. ## A bare `zig build` `zig build` with no arguments now builds the tty and GUI binaries and installs them into `~/.local/bin`, and says so once on stdout with the flag that overrides it. The old default built one binary into `zig-out` — a path nothing on a `PATH` ever looks at, which made "build it" and "use it" two different commands for no reason.
* A fourth platform: pardes as ESP32-P4 firmware, bytes in and bytes outGabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `-Dplatform=p4 -Dtarget=riscv32-freestanding` emits a single freestanding OBJECT exporting a seven-function C ABI, not an executable. The board's toolchain (../05-zig-p4) owns `_start`, the linker script and the UART driver and links this in. The seam is bytes rather than types, so neither side can accidentally depend on the other's internals, and a signature that drifts fails at link time. The serial line is the whole of the I/O. `src/p4.zig` drives vaxis unchanged over it: the renderer is a byte writer and `queryTerminalSend` is a byte writer, so the terminal emulator on the host answers the capability handshake and the firmware sees a real terminal. Measured going out over the wire on attach: alt screen, in-band resize, cursor report, kitty keyboard, kitty graphics, DA1. THREE WORDS EXIST ONLY HERE. `src/board_memory.zig` implements `Peek`, `Poke` and `Hexdump`, gated on `builtin.os.tag == .freestanding and !isWasm()` - derived from the TARGET, because they are a property of running with no OS under you rather than a product option, and because wasm is freestanding too and is exactly what must be excluded: in a browser an address is an offset into the linear memory this editor's own heap lives in. Every access goes through `*allowzero volatile`: a peripheral register is not memory, and address 0 is an ordinary unmapped address on this bus. One 4 KiB cap per command, set by the console rather than the memory - an unbounded dump would wedge the only console the board has for eleven hours. Measured on ESP32-P4 rev v1.3 silicon, driven from a host terminal: Peek 0x501101a4 0x0e63ce71, then 0xaeaa6919 on a second read - the RNG register, so the volatile loads are not folded Poke 0x5011002c 0xdeadbeef LP_STORE0; a later Peek returned 0xdeadbeef Hexdump 0x5011002c 32 16 bytes a row, hex columns and an ASCII gutter Peek 0x50110001 `peek: MisalignedAddress` on the message row That last line is the one that matters. A misaligned 32-bit access traps, and a trap in firmware is a watchdog reset that takes the session with it, so the check that turns it into a message is the reason the file is hand-written rather than a generic reader. BARE METAL BOOTS AN EMPTY OUTPUT BUFFER. Every other boot layout in `init` makes a shell, and on this platform that is not a preference but an impossibility: nothing to fork, no pty to give a terminal pane. Booting one anyway produced precisely what that describes - a pane whose tag ends in `Filter`, no gutter, no buffer, and every keystroke vanishing into the Fallback's silent pty. An output buffer is also what the platform's own words want, since Peek, Poke and Hexdump each fill one. Sized for the board rather than for a desktop: * `allocators.zig` gains a p4 tier that is ALL fallback - every capacity is zero, so each arena spills immediately to the 384 KiB heap the firmware hands over, and no megabyte-shaped static reservation lands in `.bss`. * `source_manifest.zig`'s allowlist is EMPTY on p4. The table is ~0.95 MiB of rodata against a 1.5 MiB flash partition; the firmware's filesystem is the serial host's, through the Host vtable. * The grid is clamped and the clamp is measured, not guessed: every cell is paid for four times (vaxis Screen + InternalScreen, pardes Surface + previous_cells), so 40x12 fits and 80x24 exhausts the heap during `Pardes.init`. * `Vaxis.resize` deinits both screens before allocating replacements, so a failed resize leaves vaxis rendering nothing. The p4 shell keeps the previous geometry on failure instead of leaving a half-applied one. Also here: `output_pane_integration_test.zig` had an exhaustive switch over `Platform` that adding `.p4` left unhandled, which broke `zig build unit-test` outright - the native test binary is the one consumer no platform build compiles. 346 tests pass again.
* replace ArrayLists with bounded storageGabriel Schneider2026-08-10