[shaynelegault]

The bounded append writer eventually exhausts its blank blocks. This draft provides the checkpoint encoding and transaction planning needed to develop reclamation: an owned snapshot of the whole recovered map, native context/range serialization, and checks for relocation, checkpoint readback and cold-recovery receipts.

This stacks on the bounded append-writer draft at c63274165870417f01cc3e1264067cef71d9c0b2. The current kernel source is shaynelegault/linux:p105/08-ftl-reclamation-integration at c504eae2a214915dcf5d2c4856c52e7a6ac79d2d, with source commits c8fb01811bc801be48ff7e8863dbd74c587c921e and c504eae2a214915dcf5d2c4856c52e7a6ac79d2d. Orchard carries the two source commits as MTD patches 0009 and 0010, scoped to apple-armv7, plus chip evidence and pending P105 state. Applying those exports to the append-writer source reproduces the kernel branch exactly. The selected patch counts are 33 for ARMv7 and 450 for each ARM64 platform; the ARM64 selections contain neither topic08 patch.

Snapshots cover all 15,625,016 logical keys, including the 16 keys beyond the exported disk. The encoder preserves opaque accounting payloads, updates the decoded context-block list and emits bounded subtype-4 range fragments with native metadata. The planner checks memory/capacity bounds, reserves footer space, rejects references into inactive/footer space and compares the complete recovered map. Its supplied blank/reserved/lane receipts require authoritative VFL/context ownership proof before future destructive I/O.

Kernel media GC remains disconnected. These helpers register no erase operation or GC worker. Opaque accounting still needs native field updates before a checkpoint can be installed. The current loader rejects an incomplete newest SFTL context and requires contiguous replay; native previous-checkpoint selection and interrupted-save replay remain open. Native VFL rotation also requires both its initial checkpoint retaining old table references and its final checkpoint after copying them. Physical erase effects, SLC aliasing and retirement/replacement recovery remain unqualified. P105 storage capability and installation gates stay unchanged.

Validation:

• Orchard contribution suite: 663 tests passed with one expected skip; catalog/matrix checks, 18 scoped-selection tests and the focused export test passed.
• Exact integrated core/fixture C under host ASan/UBSan: 27 writer-enabled cases and 14 read-only cases passed. Eight checkpoint/planner cases passed separately, covering opaque bytes, torn/stale receipts, source sequence gaps and allocation bounds.
• Twenty-four C metadata records matched the pinned 13G36 native formatter executed in synthetic RAM. Two hundred nine encoded maps round-tripped through the Python range decoder.
• Strict code-content checks and non-patch whitespace checks passed. Export checks retain Orchard's required Assisted-by: LLM / no-signoff policy and preserve source commit messages; unified-diff context whitespace is checked through patch application rather than as source text.
• Exact-source core, frontend, checkpoint/planner, both fixture and H2FMI provider objects compiled against the current ARMv7 tree with read-only and experimental write configs. W=1 and warnings-as-errors passed with the existing vmstat.h enum-arithmetic warning retained as a warning.
• Actual ARM64 QEMU Linux KUnit passed 35/35 tests in the pinned pristine v6.12 overlay using the exact integrated C sources. The overlay supplies a validation-only H2FMI_WRITE Kconfig dependency symbol for synthetic program callbacks; it exercises no H2FMI hardware backend or controller timing.

Native format work follows IOFlashStorage-730/13G36 and the pinned Cascadia NAND research. Public files contain synthetic fixtures and format descriptions. No revision from this draft has been qualified on physical NAND.