Once you have developed an understanding of how loaders fit into IDA’s modular architecture, you should find that loader modules are no more difficult to create than plug-in modules. Loaders clearly have their own particular subset of the SDK that they rely heavily on, the majority of which resides in loader.hpp, segment.hpp, entry.hpp, and diskio.hpp. Finally, since loaders execute before the processor module has a chance to analyze the newly loaded code, loaders should never bother themselves with any disassembly tasks, such as dealing with functions or disassembled instructions.

In the next chapter, we round out our discussion of IDA modules with an introduction to processor modules, the components most responsible for the overall formatting of a disassembled binary.