Commit graph SchOS/ldls/ko.c
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nexoniarz
f38eb8a7fd ldls: L4 was free after all, and the plan closes
L4 was listed as "free -- H2 built all of this" and never actually tested,
which is a claim rather than a result. Tested now, and it holds:

    ldlsd running     ping 2/2; holds index 7 and DMA slots 3 and 4
    killed            interface DOWN, device released, bus mastering
                      cleared, DMA reclaimed -- back to vgpud's 3 blocks
    ping              fails honestly: sendto: -5
    a second ldlsd    ping 3/3, and the arena hands back the same addresses

pciuser_release_all() and netuser_release_all() sit beside each other in
exit() for the same reason, and that they apply unchanged to a foreign driver
is the whole point of having built them against our own.

With that, every milestone on ldls.md is done, so it leaves docs/plan/ for
docs/architecture/ -- the rule docs/plan/README.md states and the one that
keeps the two directories meaning different things. The new document describes
what is, not what was planned: the five rules, the four pieces, what it costs
(polling, no stack protector, locks that are no-ops), that it can be killed,
and a "what it does not do" that leads with one driver, one kernel version,
tried once.

Sixteen source files pointed at docs/plan/ldls.md and would have been dangling
the moment it moved. All repointed, and the milestone references -- which the
architecture doc deliberately does not have -- rewritten to name sections
instead, so a reader lands somewhere real.

The register row closes with it. hybrid.md freed a slot, ldls.md took it, and
it is now free again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 13:37:04 +02:00
Nexoniarz
3fd1cc5279 ldls: the same loader, on SchOS
docs/plan/ldls.md milestone L3b. ldls/ko.c, btf.c and stub.c were written
freestanding so they would build unchanged on both sides; cmd/ldlsd collects
that promise -- the same three files, linked against lib/ instead of a libc,
in an ordinary SchOS process.

    # ldlsd /lib/modules/8139too.ko /lib/modules/btf
      module  8139too      license GPL      wants 94 symbols
      defused 6 %gs stack-guard reference(s)
      calling init_module
        1  _printk(...)
            | 8139too: 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.28
        2  __pci_register_driver(...)
      btf     122279 types
      layout  pci_driver.probe +16   pci_dev 2680 bytes
      driver  "8139too"    devices it claims: 10ec:8139 ... and 18 more
      calling probe
        1  alloc_etherdev_mqs(0x368, 0x1)
      probe returned -12 after 1 stub call(s)

Byte for byte the host harness's behaviour, which is what the shared source
was for. Two earlier predictions came good with no work: a process's mmap area
starts at 0x40000000, inside the window R_X86_64_32S needs, and the kernel
never sets EFER.NXE so every mapping is executable. The second is a gap rather
than a feature and is now recorded as one -- LDLS is relying on the absence of
a protection an OS should have.

One thing did not just work. The first run faulted before probe's first call,
err 5 -- present, read, user -- at a kernel address, with the rip resolving to

    mov %gs:0x0(%rip),%rax      # rtl8139_init_one+0x26

Modules are built -mstack-protector-guard-reg=gs, so the canary comes through
the GS segment, and that is an ABI between the kernel and its own per-CPU area
which a host that is not that kernel cannot provide. ko_defuse_gs() rewrites
those references to xor %reg,%reg.

There are two forms and the second is easy to miss: the prologue loads the
guard with mov (8b) and the epilogue compares it with sub (2b) before a jne to
__stack_chk_fail. xor is right for both -- it zeroes the saved canary and sets
ZF, so the epilogue's branch falls through exactly as a passing check does. Six
sites in 8139too.

It checks every site before patching any and refuses the whole operation on
anything it does not recognise. That refusal is what found the sub form, by
declining to guess -- a loader that half-understands an instruction should not
be editing it.

make ldls-stage/ldls-unstage put a module and its kernel's BTF into the local
sysroot and take them out again. Not part of `all`, and .gitignore refuses
*.ko, so an image only carries somebody else's GPL code between two commands
you typed on purpose.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
2026-09-14 09:10:01 +02:00
Nexoniarz
1be5f3a704 ldls: the loader, and what it measured
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
2026-09-14 07:45:31 +02:00