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ldls: the loader, and what it measured

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docs/plan/ldls.md milestone L0. ldls/ko.c indexes the sections of an ELF64
relocatable object, places the allocatable ones, resolves undefined symbols
against a caller's table and applies the relocations. Nothing is executed.

It is freestanding -- no libc, no allocation, no I/O -- so the same source
builds as a host tool now and as the SchOS-side host later. That is the
arrangement mkschfs and the kernel already share, and for the same reason:
the failures at this layer are format failures, and one found on the host
costs a second instead of a boot.

    $ ldls-inspect 8139too.ko
      module    8139too
      license   GPL
      loads to  33988 bytes
      relocations: 1980
        R_X86_64_64 363, PC32 991, PLT32 428, 32S 169, PC64 29
      undefined symbols: 94
      stops at: unresolved: __fentry__

The licence is printed before anything is loaded, because it is the one
property that decides whether the object may be on the machine at all and it
is a plain string in .modinfo. Rule 1 is easier to keep when the answer is on
screen.

94 symbols is the measured API surface of 8139too on 6.18.46 -- the list,
exactly, rather than an estimate -- and it is L1's work queue. It is smaller
than it looks: __fentry__, __stack_chk_fail, __ref_stack_chk_guard,
__x86_return_thunk and __fortify_panic are compiler and instrumentation
artefacts that stub out in a line each.

Swept over every module in a stock 6.18.46 tree: 2,440 objects, all of them
laid out and relocated to completion, none with a relocation type the loader
does not handle. That sweep is also what retired the fixed section table --
nvidia-modeset has 7,069 sections and 74,305 relocations, against a median of
50 -- so the caller supplies the table and there is no limit to run into
rather than a generous one that fails later.

Loading is not running, and the doc says so: not one symbol is implemented,
and the distance between "relocates" and "transmits a packet" is the rest of
the plan.

No .ko is in this tree and .gitignore now refuses one outright. make
ldls-check runs 18 checks against ldls/test/refmod.c, which is ours, written
to contain one of each thing the loader has to get right.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
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Nexoniarz 2026-09-14 07:45:31 +02:00
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docs/plan/1.0.md
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@ -95,7 +95,7 @@ The galling ones. The work exists, is tested, and nothing uses it.
|---|---|
| **`foundations.md`** | Item 1 built. Items 2 (a shareable memory object), 3 (`AF_UNIX` in the filesystem namespace), 4 and 5 open. **Wayland stops at item 2.** |
| ~~**`hybrid.md`**~~ | **Closed.** All four mechanisms built; H1, H2 and H3 done. H4 — the USB eviction — is *withdrawn* rather than outstanding: USB is the bus peripherals arrive on, not a peripheral, and an eviction that has to leave an identical driver behind has moved nothing. See [hybrid.md](hybrid.md), "Decided: USB stays in the kernel". |
| **`ldls.md`** | Not started. The plan exists; L0, the loader, is the first thing that would. |
| **`ldls.md`** | L0 done — the loader lays out and relocates 2,440 stock modules with nothing unhandled, and reports the API surface of each. L1 (the stubs), L2 (the hardware) and L3 (a packet) open. Nothing is executed yet. |
| **Schcom v0** | 715 lines that composite, over a wire format that is superseded. Frozen: it runs, nothing more is added, and it is kept only because it is the one thing in the tree that has ever put a client's pixels on screen. |
| **`debugger.md`** | D0 through D4 built and described in [../architecture/debugging.md](../architecture/debugging.md). Only the network transport is open — a userspace daemon bridging TCP to `/dev/dbg`, which is deliberately last. |