ldls: a Linux driver, driving real hardware

docs/plan/ldls.md milestone L3c. ldls/kpi/ implements 41 of 8139too's 94
symbols rather than logging them: register access to a mapped BAR, the PCI
calls to /dev/pci, allocation to mmap and PCIIOC_DMA, register_netdev to
/dev/netdev.

    # ldlsd /lib/modules/8139too.ko /lib/modules/btf
      found   10ec:8139 at 00:05.0
      bar 1    0x0000000081060000  256 mem
      calling probe, with 41 of 94 symbols implemented
      kpi: mapped BAR 1 -- phys 0x0000000081060000, 256 bytes
      kpi: the driver read a MAC off the hardware: 52:54:00🆎cd:ef
      netuser: ldls0 is a process now, 52:54:0🆎cd:ef
      probe returned 0 after 0 stub call(s)

52:54:00🆎cd:ef is what the machine was configured with. Nothing invented
it: the driver bit-banged the card's EEPROM, serially, through a BAR mapped by
/dev/pci, and handed back what it found. That it matches means the loader, the
relocations, the BTF offsets, the BAR mapping and the register accessors are
all correct at once, which is why it was the thing to aim at. Zero stub calls:
every symbol probe reaches is implemented.

Two bugs, one of them the kernel's.

Mine first: pci_iomap checked a failed mmap for -1 only, while SchOS returns
-errno. It returned -13 as a pointer, the driver took that as its register
base, and the first write landed at 0x4e -- thirteen below where it meant to
be.

Underneath it, the real one. sys_mmap rounds a length up to a page, the only
granularity an MMU has, and pciuser_mmio_ok() compared that against the BAR's
own size. rtl8139's registers are 256 bytes, the request became 4096, and the
answer was -EACCES for a device the process legitimately held. A BAR smaller
than a page could never be mapped at all, and nothing had noticed because the
only consumer until now was virtio-gpu, whose BARs are large. The check is now
against the pages the BAR lies in, and the widening is named where it happens:
a sub-page BAR hands over the whole page, forced by the hardware rather than
chosen.

That is exactly what hybrid.md said a foreign driver would be good for --
"what it asks for is what a foreign driver would ask for too" -- arriving as a
concrete bug rather than a prediction.

kpi_io_ok() now bounds every ioread/iowrite against the mapping pci_iomap
returned. A stray access would otherwise be a page fault with no context, and
with no IOMMU a hosted driver's wild writes have to be caught early or not at
all. It is also what turned the fault above into two lines naming the offsets.

Not done, and said so in the output rather than only in the doc: no frame has
moved. ndo_open is never called and there is no transmit or receive path, so
ldlsd releases the interface instead of leaving it up -- a link that reports
itself up with nothing draining its queue is a black hole, and the stack would
send DHCP into it for ever. Down is the true answer until packets move. That
is L3d, now listed separately.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-14 09:59:14 +02:00
commit 42f98130c4
11 changed files with 1071 additions and 44 deletions

View file

@ -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`** | L0, L1, L2 and L3a done — the loader handles 2,440 stock modules; 449 of 500 run `init_module`; `8139too`'s `probe()` runs to completion; and `/dev/netdev` lets a process be an interface, with `ping` working over one. L3b done too — `ldlsd` runs the same loader on SchOS and gets a real driver's `probe()` to return. L3c (the fifteen symbols, against `/dev/pci`) open. No Linux driver has yet touched hardware. |
| **`ldls.md`** | L0, L1, L2 and L3a done — the loader handles 2,440 stock modules; 449 of 500 run `init_module`; `8139too`'s `probe()` runs to completion; and `/dev/netdev` lets a process be an interface, with `ping` working over one. L3b done too — `ldlsd` runs the same loader on SchOS and gets a real driver's `probe()` to return. L3c done — a Linux driver now drives real hardware through `/dev/pci` and reads the card's own MAC off its EEPROM. L3d, the packet path, is what remains. |
| **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. |