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ldls: ping, over a Linux driver

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docs/plan/ldls.md L3d, and with it L3 -- the milestone the plan calls the one
that proves the whole idea and the one that cannot be skipped.

    # ldlsd /lib/modules/8139too.ko /lib/modules/btf &
      kpi: the driver read a MAC off the hardware: 52:54:00🆎cd:ef
      ndo_open returned 0
      carrying frames. the interface is ldls0.

    # cat /proc/netif
    interface ldls0   state up   address 10.9.0.15   gateway 10.9.0.2

    # ping 10.9.0.2 4
    64 bytes from 10.9.0.2: icmp_seq=1 time=30 ms
    64 bytes from 10.9.0.2: icmp_seq=2 time=20 ms
    64 bytes from 10.9.0.2: icmp_seq=3 time=20 ms
    64 bytes from 10.9.0.2: icmp_seq=4 time=20 ms

10.9.0.0/24 is reachable only through ldls0, and ldls0 is 8139too running in a
SchOS process. The address was obtained by DHCP over the same driver first.
lwIP -> netdev_ops -> /dev/netdev -> ldlsd -> ndo_start_xmit -> a BAR mapped by
/dev/pci -> the wire, and the whole way back. Nothing in the kernel knows a
Linux driver is involved; nothing in the driver knows it is not in Linux.

It polls rather than taking interrupts. /dev/pci delivers them by blocking
read(), which needs a thread this program does not have, so the driver's NAPI
poll is called from a loop instead -- the same work in a context LDLS can
provide, at the cost of latency and a spinning process.

Four things Linux's alloc_etherdev does that allocating does not, each found by
the driver faulting on it: dev->dev_addr is a pointer aimed at perm_addr;
dev->mc and dev->uc are list heads and are empty only when they point at
themselves; dev->_tx is an array of netdev_queue, because netif_start_queue
clears a bit in _tx[0].state; and __LINK_STATE_START is set by dev_open before
ndo_open is called.

Two did not announce themselves, and they are the ones worth recording.

netif_running(dev) gates 8139too's receive loop. Without it the chip received
the frame, the driver acknowledged the interrupt and left the loop, and nothing
came out -- while every counter said packets were arriving. Found by reading
the chip's own CBR register through the BAR and seeing the hardware had written
600 bytes the driver never collected.

memcpy was still a logging stub. The driver copied each frame into its sk_buff,
the copy did not happen, and the stack was handed exactly the right length of
zeroes; DHCP never completed and nothing reported an error. A stub that returns
zero is not safe for a function whose whole job is a side effect, and the
memory primitives are the worst case because they fail silently and plausibly.
ldls/kpi/string.c exists because of it.

Still one driver, one kernel version, tried once, against an emulated card --
which is what the plan has always promised and is worth repeating next to a
working ping.

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 11:14:18 +02:00
commit 888c48fd96
9 changed files with 809 additions and 14 deletions
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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`** | 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. |
| **`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. **L3 done: `ping` works over a Linux driver.** `8139too`, loaded by our loader, running in a SchOS process, driving QEMU's rtl8139 through `/dev/pci`, carrying DHCP and ICMP both ways on a subnet reachable only through it. One driver, one kernel version, tried once — and the network transport for the debugger is the only thing still open on any plan. |
| **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. |