ldls: Apache-2.0, and where the boundary actually is
Answers the question directly in docs/licensing.md §6, because "LDLS runs Linux drivers" reads like it contradicts §2 and does not. LDLS is Apache-2.0. Every file under ldls/ is ours; the loader came from the ELF-64 gABI and the x86-64 psABI. The licence of LDLS and the licence status of what happens at run time are two different questions and only the first is about us: ldls/ Apache-2.0 distributed by us a .ko GPL-2.0 distributed by the user's distro the two in one process -- distributed by nobody GPLv2 §0 says where its obligations attach -- "the act of running the Program is not restricted" -- so no combined work is distributed by anyone and no obligation is triggered. Same position FreeBSD has shipped from for a decade. Stated honestly in the same section: the *user* cannot redistribute the combination either, which is why RAMDISK_EXCLUDE exists and why .gitignore refuses *.ko. EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL was left open in the plan; it is now answered and the answer is cleaner than expected. That marking gates *Linux's own* symbols. Every symbol LDLS provides is ours, reimplemented from facts, so there is no gate being bypassed because no Linux symbol is being exposed. LDLS implements no licence check -- it reads the declared licence and prints it before loading anything. And the sharpest edge in rule 3 mostly goes away. The uncomfortable row was struct layouts, which a compiled driver indexes by offset, so the shim must reproduce them exactly -- and a field-for-field match looks like transcription even when it is not. It does not have to be in our source: kernels built with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF publish /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux, and that carries both the layouts and the function prototypes as generated type data about the kernel the user already has. Verified on this machine: struct pci_dev field by field, and FUNC 'pci_iomap' with its FUNC_PROTO. LDLS reads them at load time on the user's machine; our source contains neither. That also mostly dissolves rule 4, since BTF describes the kernel that is actually installed rather than one pinned by guessing. What BTF does not give is behaviour -- what napi_complete_done *does* is still ours to write from documentation, and that is the whole of the real work. Also adds the SPDX header ldls/ko.h was missing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
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// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
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#pragma once
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// Loading a relocatable object. docs/plan/ldls.md milestone L0.
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