LithosAnanake/FABRIC-3.5.md

FABRIC-3.5.md — the Tripod/kernel reshuffle

Status: Standalone working document, opened 2026-09-18 by direct instruction ("we write this in FABRIC-3.5.md as its own document, it's this important"). Topic: relocating Hermes into the kernel, reconstituting the Tripod as Hera/Artemis/Console, generalizing BIRTH, and adopting one fleet-wide failure/recovery ladder.

Why 3.5 and not 4, and why not a section of 3. FABRIC-4.md is explicitly the lower-discipline scratchpad for theory-stage ideas "caught early... often missing a stated 'why' on purpose." This is not that: it is a ratified architectural direction with a stated shape, and it needs the full discipline every numbered FABRIC document carries. But it is also not bare-metal boot, which is FABRIC-3.md's declared topic, and it is not a successor to FABRIC-3.md — FABRIC-3.md remains open, living, and authoritative for its own topic; nothing here supersedes it, and this document does not trigger the close-and-carry-forward discipline the FABRIC-0 → -1 → -2 → -3 chain used (that chain triggers on closing a document). It sits at 3.5 because it is a peer in rigor and an outsider in topic.

How to use this document. Same discipline as the rest of the series: write the decision and its reasoning down before building, close items with a dated note citing real evidence, never silently drop a stale claim. New findings and decisions for the reshuffle get added here, not to FABRIC-3.md.

Scope discipline, stated up front: this is a reorganization, not an invention. Per the instruction opening it — "most of the underlying logic (Hermes routing, Artemis block I/O, Hera lifecycle/ACL, Console framebuffer) already exists and is expected to be relocated and rewired rather than rewritten." Any item in this document that turns out to need a genuinely new algorithm is by that fact out of scope and gets flagged, not quietly built.

No code is authorized by this document. Design only. Per Captain Bob's Law (.claude/CLAUDE.md): never apply a fix not explicitly requested.

Provenance convention used below. This series distinguishes what was read from what was recalled, so each claim says which. "Traced 2026-09-18" = the file was read directly while writing this document. "Per §X" = the fact is reported by an existing FABRIC section that did its own end-to-end read; it is cited, not re-verified here. "Open" = not decided. Several items below are deliberately marked for re-verification before any code is written, because a reorganization that trusts a stale map moves the wrong things.

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I. The current shape, traced rather than recalled

Before moving anything, what is actually there today. All of §I traced 2026-09-18 against the working tree at commit e56974e, except where marked.

I.1 — Hermes is a FORTH capsule VM, and the routing layer is FORTH, not C

capsules/hermes/init.4th is short and load-bearing. Its block 5116 says it outright:

Hermes owns the one real, canonical COMMON-CH. Every other VM subscribes into it via VM-EXEC (see Artemis's and Hera's own init.4th); Hera always exists first, so Hermes adds her here rather than Hera subscribing to a VM that doesn't exist yet at Hera's own birth.

It then does S" common:messaging.4th" EXEC, MSG-CD-INIT, 1 MY-CH-ID !, and adds members 1 and 0 to COMMON-CH. That is the whole of Hermes's own identity: it is the VM that happens to hold the canonical channel.

The mechanism it holds is capsules/common/messaging.4th (504 lines) — generic per-VM messaging vocabulary that every participating VM loads its own copy of. This matters more than it first appears. Block 5005 allocates the arenas with CREATE ... ALLOT:

CREATE MSG-ARENA MSG-MAX MSG-CELLS * CELLS ALLOT
CREATE CH-ARENA  CH-MAX  CH-CELLS  * CELLS ALLOT
CREATE MBR-ARENA MBR-MAX MBR-CELLS * CELLS ALLOT

CREATE/ALLOT carves out of the dictionary of whichever VM is interpreting. So today there is no single routing fabric — there are N per-VM copies of the same vocabulary, and Hermes is distinguished only by convention (it holds COMMON-CH; it is routing table index 1). The arbitration is distributed and conventional, not centralized and structural.

I.2 — Hermes is a hard, by-name dependency of its peers

CORRECTED 2026-09-18 by §XIII.1 — this section undercounts. It names two call sites; the full repo-wide inventory is 14 by-name FORTH references across 5 files, plus 3 C-side sites and a DoE CSV schema site. The two below are real, are among the only three live ones, and remain the sharpest edge — but read §XIII.1 for the actual extent. Left in place rather than rewritten, per this series' own "never silently drop a stale claim" rule.

Artemis does not talk to an abstract routing layer. It talks to a VM called Hermes, by name, via VM-EXEC. Two live call sites in capsules/artemis/init.4th:

• line ~138: S" 2 ENQUEUE-READY" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC
• line ~501: S" 2 COMMON-CH @ CH-ADD-MBR" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC

Both execute FORTH text inside Hermes's own dictionary. Either one breaks the moment Hermes is not a VM with a dictionary. This is the single most concrete consequence of the move and §III.3 is about it.

I.3 — The routing table pins 0/1/2 and says so

messaging.4th block 5006, verbatim comment:

VM routing table. §XIX: 16 slots, not 8 — see FABRIC-3.md. Hera/Hermes/Artemis stay 0/1/2 (artemis:init.4th depends on it); identities get NEW slots 3–10, never renumbered.

VM-NAMES-INIT registers Hera 0, Hermes 1, Artemis 2, then identities from 3 up via DOE-IDX>MSG-IDX ( doe-idx -- msg-idx ) 2 +. "Never renumbered" is an existing, written commitment, and the reshuffle walks straight into it (§IV.2).

I.4 — Message types in use, and the free numbers

Traced across messaging.4th: SPAWN-EVENT 1, PAUSE-EVENT 2, RESUME-EVENT 3, KILL-EVENT 4, CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT 7, ELEVATE-REQUEST 8, BLK-ATTACH-EVENT 9. Reserved status sentinels at the top of the range: MSG-NACKED 253, MSG-DELIVERED 255.

5 and 6 are unallocated gaps; 10 is the next in sequence. Relevant to §VII, which needs a number for SOS. Also relevant: per §XX, SPAWN-EVENT was grepped for every consumer across the tree and has none — "an unwired placeholder, not working infrastructure." Do not model SOS on it as though it were a working precedent.

I.5 — BIRTH is already VM-agnostic in C; Hera's monopoly is registration-time

Per §XX, which read mama_word_birth (mama_forth_words.c:229, BIRTH's C implementation) in full:

It is genuinely VM-agnostic — it operates on whichever vm calls it, with no check that the caller is Hera specifically. The only Hera-specific logic anywhere in it is the reverse guard preventing Hera from re-birthing herself. capsule_birth_baby() treats vm->stadium_vm_id generically as "whoever is birthing this VM." So "any VM could theoretically birth another" is already true in the code... Hera's practical monopoly on BIRTH is a registration-time fact (only register_mama_forth_words() registers it), not a check inside BIRTH itself.

This is the single most important pre-existing fact in this document. §VI is not a redesign of BIRTH; it is a change to which VMs get it registered, plus an inheritance rule.

I.6 — Console already has a real bind mechanism, built and live-verified

Per §XXXII.2, closed 2026-09-16: CONSOLE-ATTACH ( name-c name-u -- ok? ) exists, is a plain unconditional primitive (deliberately not an identity capability bit — that was tried and rejected on two counts), and was verified end to end on amd64: UNATTENDED-BIRTH a VM named bob → CONSOLE-ATTACH bob → S" bob" USE → typing 5 6 + . at the new console relayed to and executed on the target identity VM, printing [zuse@bob~user] 11 ok>.

Also live: capsule_console_birth() (minimal relay proxy, bare username) paired to capsule_runcap_birth() (the real identity, <username>~user) by name convention plus one VM-NAME-REG executed inside the console VM's own dictionary — confirmed per-console-VM, not a global singleton, so after-the-fact pairing already works structurally.

§V is therefore mostly a promotion of an existing, proven mechanism to an architectural role — not new construction.

I.7 — The headless-until-login invariant

Per §VIII.1 (ratified) and §XXXII.2: g_wirebind_attached_username is what sk_console_identity_present() reads (capsule_wirebind.c:321-327), and that function is the live "no thumbdrive, no prompt" gate. §XXXII.2 states the rule as an explicit invariant for any new birth path: never set that global, never touch the console-pairing mechanism, or you bring up a console with no human present and reopen a gate that was deliberately closed. §V and §VI both have to carry this invariant forward.

I.8 — The idle pump, and why Hera is special-cased in it

Per §XX: repl.c's idle loop walks the VM registry every idle beat, VM-EXECing "MSG-TICK" into every other live VM to drain its queue, skipping Hera — because Hera is the pump and self-targeting VM-EXEC would hit a known reentrancy class. Hera instead gets a direct MSG-TICK word dispatch in her own context, guarded by a fresh vm_find_word + acl_allow check every tick rather than a cached flag.

So there is already a kernel-resident component driving the messaging layer's clock. The pump is in repl.c, in C, today. §III is in part an admission that the arbiter's center of gravity is already partly there.

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II. What the reshuffle is, in one paragraph

Hermes stops being a peer VM on the Stadium floor and becomes a kernel-resident arbiter between the floor and the HAL. It stops being a client of ACL-checked, Hermes-routed messaging and becomes the routing and arbitration layer itself. The Tripod — which was Hera, Hermes, Artemis — is reconstituted as Hera, Artemis, Console, with Artemis keeping its existing storage/block-arbitration role and Console taking the vacated third slot. Console's own role widens from owning the drawing fabric to being the bind point where users and agent VMs (the GPIO VM of FABRIC-4.md §2, future networking VMs) attach. BIRTH becomes a general primitive any VM with standing may invoke, with authority bounded by inheritance rather than by a separate check. And every VM in the fleet — current and future — adopts one escalation ladder on failure: recover gently, escalate to a from-scratch birth, then fail fast and total.

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III. Hermes moves into the kernel

III.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Hermes is no longer a Tripod VM. It becomes kernel-resident, sitting between the Stadium floor and the HAL. It no longer participates in Hermes-routed, ACL-checked messaging the way the other VMs do — it is the routing/arbitration layer now, not a client of it.

III.2 — What that actually changes, structurally

The self-reference in "Hermes cannot be a client of Hermes" is the whole point, and it has a concrete reading against §I.1: today Hermes holds COMMON-CH inside a FORTH dictionary that is itself subject to the same ACL and Stadium-heat economy as every other VM's. An arbiter whose own arbitration state can be evicted, cooled, or ACL-denied by the mechanism it arbitrates is a circular dependency that happens not to have bitten yet. Moving it into the kernel breaks the circle by construction.

Note this is also what makes §VII's SOS exception (Hermes cannot route a message announcing its own routing failure) not a special case but a direct corollary — see §VIII.

III.3 — The by-name VM-EXEC dependency has to go somewhere. Open.

SUPERSEDED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2 — this question dissolved. The three options below all assume the existing FORTH callers must be preserved. Captain Bob ruled the FORTH messaging layer legacy, so §XIII.1's inventory becomes input to a dead-FORTH cleanup rather than a migration constraint. Left in place, not rewritten.

§I.2's two Artemis call sites are the sharp edge. S" ..." S" Hermes" VM-EXEC requires a target VM with a dictionary. Three shapes are visible; none is chosen here:

1. Kernel primitives replace the by-name calls. ENQUEUE-READY and CH-ADD-MBR become registered C words callable directly by any VM, and Artemis simply calls them. Closest to "relocated, not rewritten"; largest registration-surface change.
2. A vestigial Hermes name that the kernel answers. VM-EXEC to Hermes is intercepted and serviced by the kernel arbiter, leaving caller text untouched. Smallest diff, but it preserves a fiction and this project has a standing distaste for exactly that (§XXXII.2 Q3's rejection of an unreachable gate on doctrine grounds, not just mechanics).
3. Artemis subscribes through a new kernel-side registration call at birth, removing the peer-to-peer step entirely.

Decide this on paper before touching code. Whichever wins, the two Artemis lines and the STARTUP-BANNER/LOG-INFO" scaffolding in capsules/hermes/init.4th are the concrete edit set, plus whatever else a full grep for S" Hermes" VM-EXEC turns up — that grep has not been run exhaustively for this document and must be, repo-wide, before scoping.

III.4 — The per-VM-arena question. Open, and the biggest unknown here.

RESOLVED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2. Answered in the "full centralization" direction, but without the migration cost this section feared: with the FORTH legacy there is no live state to port. This was named the root dependency throughout §X; it is closed. Left in place, not rewritten.

Per §I.1 the arenas are per-VM dictionary allocations. If arbitration centralizes into the kernel, does MSG-ARENA/CH-ARENA/MBR-ARENA centralize with it, or does each VM keep its own outbox/inbox with only the routing centralized? These are very different amounts of work and very different risk:

• Routing-only centralization keeps messaging.4th largely intact, keeps the Stadium heat economy's "sender pays" property (per §XX: STADIUM-RES-PULL/-PUSH operate on the calling VM's own reservoir), and is genuinely a reshuffle.
• Full arena centralization moves FORTH dictionary state into kernel C, changes every VM's dict_hash, and needs the three-arch parity story re-established from scratch.

Not decided. Flagged here because the executive framing ("relocated and rewired rather than rewritten") holds comfortably for the first and is strained by the second.

III.5 — Parity consequence, stated so it is not discovered late

Any change to what register_*_words() registers, or to what init.4th loads, changes VM dictionary contents and therefore dict_hash. §XX's own verification standard applies: the property that matters is identical dict_hash across amd64/aarch64/riscv64, not an unchanging absolute value. Expect the absolute hashes to move; require the cross-arch identity to hold. Acceptance is the three-arch QEMU boot to zuse)ok> with zero UNKNOWN WORD faults, per .claude/CLAUDE.md's non-negotiable criteria — there is no other test.

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IV. The Tripod reconstituted: Hera, Artemis, Console

IV.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Tripod = Hera, Artemis, Console. Artemis keeps its existing role (storage/block arbitration) unchanged. Console takes the slot Hermes vacates.

IV.2 — The "never renumbered" collision. Open, needs a ruling.

DISSOLVED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2 — via option 3 below, exactly as this section predicted. The FORTH routing table is legacy, so the slot-numbering question has no subject. Option 3's own caveat ("settle §III.4 first") was the correct call. Left in place, not rewritten.

§I.3's comment commits to Hera/Hermes/Artemis at 0/1/2 and to identities at 3–10 never being renumbered. Hermes leaving index 1 forces a choice, and the existing comment forecloses the laziest option:

1. Console takes index 1. Tidy, preserves the "Tripod occupies 0/1/2" shape, and requires no identity renumbering — but it silently redefines what slot 1 means, and artemis:init.4th's dependence on the numbering is on 2, not 1, so it may be survivable.
2. Index 1 is retired; Console takes a fresh slot. Honest, costs a slot out of 16, and leaves a permanent hole that needs a comment explaining itself forever.
3. The routing table stops being a FORTH array at all, because §III moved routing into the kernel — in which case this question dissolves into §III.4's arena question and should not be answered separately.

Not decided. Note option 3 makes 1 and 2 moot, so settle §III.4 first. This ordering matters: answering IV.2 before III.4 risks ratifying a table that the kernel move deletes.

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V. Console's role expands: the bind point

V.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Beyond owning the drawing fabric, Console becomes the bind point for users and agent VMs — GPIO VM, future networking VMs, and whatever follows. The attach point that was previously implicit or undecided now lives here, explicitly.

V.2 — This is mostly promotion of an existing mechanism, not new construction

Per §I.6, CONSOLE-ATTACH already resolves a target's liveness by name before birthing a console (so a typo refuses cleanly with no orphaned VM — verified live), and console/user pairing already works after the fact. The reshuffle's contribution is declaring that this is the fleet's attach point, and then asking the question the current mechanism does not yet answer: it was built for human at a console attaching to an identity VM. An agent VM — a GPIO VM per FABRIC-4.md §2, pinned and born at boot with no human anywhere near it — is a different shape wearing the same word.

V.3 — Genuinely open

1. Does an agent VM bind through CONSOLE-ATTACH or through a sibling word? sk_repl_dispatch_line()'s pairing check reconstructs the target as console_get_vm_name() + "~user" (per §XXXII.2, and the cause of a real bug caught live when a console was named anything else). A GPIO VM is not a ~user identity. Either the naming convention widens or agent binding takes its own path.
2. Does binding an agent VM touch g_wirebind_attached_username? It must not — §I.7. State this as an explicit invariant in whatever implements it, exactly as §XXXII.2 required of unattended birth.
3. Is Console's bind role ACL-gated, and if so where? Per .claude/CLAUDE.md's hard rule and §XXXII.2 Q3's correction: policy belongs in ACL.4th, never in C. The shape is ' CONSOLE-ATTACH ACL-PIN (or a sibling word's equivalent) in ACL.4th, not a C-side capability check — and specifically not a vm_identity_has_cap() gate, which §XXXII.2 proved unreachable because identity.installed is 0 for Hera/Hermes/Artemis and for every console-proxy VM.
4. Does Console-as-bind-point survive Console being a Tripod member? A Tripod VM is pinned and born at boot (session_register()/session_set_pinned(), per FABRIC-2.md §H.12 step 4; "pinned sessions never leave," §H.1 — cited from .claude/CLAUDE.md's and §XX's references, not re-read for this document; verify before relying on it). Whether the drawing-fabric owner and the bind-point arbiter are the same VM or two roles that happen to share a name is not settled here.

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VI. BIRTH as a general primitive

VI.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

BIRTH is a general primitive, not Hera-exclusive. Any VM with standing can invoke it. A birthed VM inherits its ACL/DNA from the birthing VM. A VM can never birth something with more authority than it itself holds — enforced by inheritance, not by a separate authorization check.

VI.2 — Why this is small in C and large in policy

Per §I.5 the C implementation is already VM-agnostic; the monopoly is which registration function hands out the word. So the mechanical change is registration, and the design work is entirely in the inheritance rule.

The rule as stated is elegant precisely because it needs no gate: if a child's authority is derived from the parent's, "cannot exceed the parent" is not a check that can be bypassed, forgotten, or misconfigured — it is a property of how the child is constructed. This is the same doctrine §XXXII.2 Q3 landed on from the opposite direction (a bespoke gate that can never open is worse than no gate), and the same doctrine ZUSE-ELIGIBILITY-ADD already carries.

VI.3 — "ACL/DNA" needs a precise referent. Open, and this is the real work.

The system has a word-level ACL: four DictEntry fields (acl_ttl, acl_allow, acl_mode, acl_pinned), a C primitive ACL-INHERIT (traced 2026-09-18 in capsules/ACL.4th's own primitive list, line 6), and the semantics "pin is one-way; inheritance clears pin, copies mode" (per .claude/CLAUDE.md). What §VI.1 describes is VM-level inheritance — a different axis. Two things must be settled before any code:

1. Is VM-level DNA just "the child's dictionary is built from the parent's, with per-word state carried by the existing ACL-INHERIT"? If yes, this is genuinely a reshuffle and the existing primitive does the work. If no, something new is being invented and that contradicts this document's own scope discipline — flag it rather than build it.
2. Hard constraint: .claude/CLAUDE.md states "Never add acl_* fields to DictEntry beyond the four already present." Any DNA design that wants a fifth per-word field is ruled out at the door. If VM-level authority needs state, it belongs on the VM, not on every dictionary entry.

VI.4 — "With standing" is undefined. Open.

§VI.1 says any VM with standing. Standing is not currently a concept in this codebase — traced: no such notion appears in the ACL vocabulary or the Stadium words. Candidate readings: (a) standing = simply having BIRTH registered, which collapses it into §VI.2's registration question and makes the phrase decorative; (b) standing = a Stadium-economy property (sufficient reservoir to pay for a child, consistent with "sender pays"); (c) standing = an ACL.4th policy predicate. Not decided. (a) is the minimal reading and the one most consistent with "do not over-engineer"; (b) is the one most consistent with the rest of the fleet's physics.

VI.5 — Invariants that must survive

• The reverse guard preventing Hera from re-birthing herself (per §I.5) still has to hold, and now has to hold for every birther with respect to itself.
• capsule_birth_baby() must stay the generic path — per §XXXII.2 it is already what every (p) capsule uses across four call sites, and capsule_runcap_birth() was explicitly established as the wrong tool for build-time-sourced births.
• Unattended/agent births must not set g_wirebind_attached_username (§I.7).
• ' BIRTH must not enter capsules/ACL.4th — per .claude/CLAUDE.md, ACL.4th is shared and portable, BIRTH is kernel-only, and the file deliberately omits it (comment at ~line 64). Generalizing BIRTH does not change this; pin it in a kernel-specific capsule.

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VII. One fleet-wide failure/recovery ladder

VII.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

A single escalation shape, applied consistently across the fleet — current VMs and future ones (GPIO, networking, whatever comes):

1. Recover gently first. For a VM with continuity to preserve (Hera being the type case), this means warm restart — resume with prior state intact.
2. Escalate if gentle recovery fails. Fall back to a from-scratch BIRTH — no continuity, rebuild fleet-state/trust from nothing.
3. Fail brutally once genuinely exhausted. No lingering, no partial states. Once recovery options are spent the failure is fast and total, not a slow degrade.

The value here is uniformity: one shape for Hera, Hermes, Console and every future VM, instead of bespoke handling per component.

VII.2 — SOS as a standard message type

Decided: SOS is a standard message type any VM can emit — not specific to any one component. It applies to non-Tripod VMs and to two of the three Tripod VMs (Hera and Console). Hermes is the exception, for a structural reason — §VIII.

Grounding and open points:

• It takes a number from §I.4's space. 5 and 6 are unallocated gaps; 10 is next in sequence. Picking a gap vs. appending is a small call but should be made deliberately, not by whoever types first.
• Do not model it on SPAWN-EVENT. Per §XX that constant has zero consumers anywhere in the tree — it is an unwired placeholder. A message type with no dispatcher is exactly the failure mode SOS cannot afford.
• Open: who consumes an SOS, and what do they do with it? The executive framing says SOS is emitted; it does not say who acts. Given §IX (no VM assumes another's authority), the consumer set is constrained but not specified.

VII.3 — The existing precedent this should be reconciled with

WITHDRAWN 2026-09-18 by §XV.2 — this section's premise is wrong. It assumed the ladder needs a detection mechanism. Death is compudynamic: no detector, no declarer, nothing to build. The closing claim below ("a recovery ladder with no detection story only ever triggers on failures loud enough to notice by accident") does not hold. The wellness-check idea stands on its own merits, unrelated to this ladder. Left in place, not rewritten.

Per §XX, closed as captured-for-later: Captain Bob's self-healing idea — "all VMs participating in a wellness check at their nearest participating wellness center" — a distributed liveness/failure-detection concept "deliberately not built as part of this fix."

That idea and this ladder are the same problem approached from two ends: wellness checks are how a failure gets detected; the ladder is what happens after. Neither document has reconciled them. Flagged as open, and as the natural next thing to settle, because a recovery ladder with no detection story only ever triggers on failures loud enough to notice by accident.

VII.4 — Open: what "warm restart" concretely means

Warm restart implies a state boundary — what is "prior state" for a VM, and where does it live across the restart? Candidate anchors traced or cited: the Stadium reservoir/heat state, the VM's dictionary, its message arenas (§III.4 — if those centralize into the kernel, warm restart gets easier, which is an argument to settle §III.4 first), its identity struct. Not designed here. Note also that "fail brutally" must not mean "leave the Stadium's conservation invariant K broken" — per FABRIC-3.md §XVIII that invariant is continuously verified, so a brutal death still has to return what it held. Cited from §XVIII's heading, not re-read for this document; verify before relying on it.

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VIII. Hermes's exception: the sinking semaphore

VIII.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Hermes cannot emit SOS, because Hermes is the message arbiter and it cannot route a message announcing its own routing failure. Instead of emitting SOS, Hermes raises a semaphore signaling that it is sinking, and holds it until it goes down. This gives the rest of the fleet a window to shut down cleanly rather than going dark with no warning.

VIII.2 — Why this is a corollary, not a special case

This is the direct consequence of §III.2. The instant Hermes stops being a client of its own routing layer, any failure-announcement it might send has no transport — the transport is the thing that failed. A semaphore is the right shape precisely because it is not a message: it does not require the failed subsystem to work, and a held-until-death signal degrades correctly (release = gone) rather than requiring a successful final transmission.

Worth stating plainly because it reframes the whole design: the fleet's failure signalling is two mechanisms, not one, and which one a VM uses is determined by whether it is above or below the routing layer. Everything on the Stadium floor sends SOS. The arbiter beneath it raises a semaphore. That is a clean rule with no exceptions list to maintain.

VIII.3 — Open

PARTLY SETTLED 2026-09-18 by §XVI. The second bullet (what a clean-shutdown routine does) is answered: forced blk_flush(0), then BYE; Hera's is suicide via a permanent arch_halt() loop. The third (is the window bounded) answers itself — the window ends when Hera halts, a bound by construction rather than by timer (§XVI.4). The first bullet, where the semaphore mechanically lives, remains open. Left in place, not rewritten.

• Where does the semaphore live, mechanically? It must be readable by VMs whose messaging is dying. Kernel-resident, below the routing layer, is the only coherent answer, but the concrete form is unspecified.
• What does a VM's "clean shutdown routine" actually do? §IX makes this fleet-wide behavior, so it needs a single definition — and it must satisfy §VII.4's note about the conservation invariant.
• Is the window bounded? "Holds it until it goes down" gives no deadline. If Hermes sinks slowly, do VMs shut down on the signal alone or wait for release?

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IX. Birther failure: no provisional handoff

IX.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

If a VM responsible for birthing/lifecycle decisions (total Hera failure is the type case) exhausts its own ladder — warm restart, then from-scratch BIRTH — and still cannot recover, there is no provisional handoff of its authority to another VM. No VM assumes partial or stolen authority on another's behalf. Instead, the rest of the fleet runs its own shutdown routines — the same clean-shutdown behavior §VIII's sinking semaphore triggers, applied fleet-wide.

IX.2 — Why this is consistent rather than merely austere

It is the same invariant as §VI, read from the other side. §VI says a VM can never birth something with more authority than it holds. §IX says a VM can never acquire authority it was not born with, even when the holder is gone and the authority is going begging. Together: authority only ever flows down the birth graph, never sideways and never up. No VM ends up holding authority it wasn't born with, and no VM limps in a half-failed state — every path terminates in either full recovery or fast, clean termination.

That is a strong, checkable property, and it is worth writing down as the thing to defend when some future failure mode makes a provisional handoff look temporarily attractive.

IX.3 — Open

PREMISE REJECTED 2026-09-18 by §XV.2. The first bullet asks the wrong question. Nobody declares a VM dead — it dies a compudynamic death. The "circular by construction" difficulty was an artifact of assuming death is a judgment someone renders rather than a physical outcome of the physics. Left in place, not rewritten.

• What has standing to declare a birther dead? Circular by construction: the fleet must conclude Hera is gone without Hera participating. Ties directly to §VII.3's undesigned detection story.
• Does fleet shutdown mean the kernel halts, or that the floor empties and the kernel survives? Materially different outcomes, not specified.

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X. Sequencing — dependencies between the open questions

These do not decompose into independent work items; several answers foreclose others. The dependency order that fell out of writing this up:

1. §III.4 (arenas: routing-only vs. full centralization) is the root. It determines whether §IV.2's routing-table question exists at all, and materially changes §VII.4's warm restart.
2. §III.3 (the by-name VM-EXEC dependency) — needs a repo-wide S" Hermes" VM-EXEC grep first, which has not been done.
3. §IV.2 (slot numbering) — only if §III.4 leaves a FORTH routing table standing.
4. §VI.3 (what "ACL/DNA" refers to) — independent of the above; gates all of §VI.
5. §VII.3 (reconciling the ladder with the wellness-check idea) — gates §VII.2's consumer question and §IX.3's declare-dead question, which are the same question twice.
6. §V.3 (agent-VM binding) — needs §VI settled, since an agent VM is birthed before it is bound.

---

XI. Punch list — design only, no code authorized

Nothing here is started. Nothing here authorizes an edit. Numbered for discussion order, not execution order.

1. ✅ CLOSED 2026-09-18 (§XIII.1). Repo-wide by-name Hermes inventory: 14 FORTH sites across 5 files, 3 C-side sites, 1 DoE CSV schema site. Only 3 are live. §I.2 corrected.
2. ✅ CLOSED 2026-09-18 (§XIII.4). All three citations verified against source; §V.3.4 and §VII.4 may now be relied on.
3. ⬜ Settle §III.4: routing-only vs. full arena centralization. Root dependency — do first.
4. ⬜ Settle §III.3 given 3.
5. ⬜ Settle §IV.2 if and only if 3 leaves a FORTH routing table standing.
6. ⬜ Settle §VI.3: precise referent for "ACL/DNA", against the four-field DictEntry constraint.
7. ⬜ Settle §VI.4: what "standing" means, or rule it decorative.
8. ⬜ Reconcile §VII.3: the ladder vs. the wellness-check detection idea.
9. ⬜ Assign SOS a message-type number deliberately (§VII.2), with a named consumer.
10. ⬜ Specify the sinking semaphore's mechanism and the clean-shutdown routine (§VIII.3).
11. ⬜ Answer §IX.3: what declares a birther dead, and what fleet shutdown means concretely.
12. ⬜ NEW 2026-09-18 (§XIII.5). Rule on whether the Console Tripod leg is a new singleton, distinct from today's plural per-attach console proxies. Gates §IV.1 and §IV.2 — sits above the slot-numbering question, not beside it.
13. ⬜ NEW 2026-09-18 (§XIII.2), not part of this reshuffle. Authorize a capsules/MANIFEST.md correction pass for two false claims: block 4055's "immutable ABI" (FABRIC-2.md declared it stale and it was never corrected) and block 2049's stated contents. Reported, not fixed, per Captain Bob's Law.

Acceptance for anything that eventually comes out of this list, per .claude/CLAUDE.md's non-negotiable criteria: three-arch QEMU boot (amd64, aarch64, riscv64, one at a time, in the foreground, clean before qemu), all reaching zuse)ok> with zero UNKNOWN WORD faults, logs present under logs/, and dict_hash identical across all three architectures. There is no other test.

---

XII. Explicitly not decided anywhere in this document

Collected so nothing here is mistaken for settled. Updated 2026-09-18 after §XV's rulings. Most of this list is now closed — see §XIV.2 and §XV.6 for what resolved, dissolved, or had its premise rejected.

Still genuinely open — updated again 2026-09-18 after §XVI settled item 10.

• Item 12 (§XIII.5) — is the Console Tripod leg a new singleton, distinct from today's per-attach proxies? Now the largest remaining design item, and still gates §IV.
• Item 9 (§VII.2/§XVI.5) — half-answered. The consumer action is defined for the two fleet-fatal cases; open is whether an ordinary peer's SOS is actionable or merely advisory, plus the trivial number allocation.
• §VIII.3 first bullet — where the sinking semaphore mechanically lives. The rest of §VIII.3 is settled by §XVI.
• Item 16 (§XV.4) — an implementation check rather than a decision: every message-holding teardown path must reach STADIUM-EVICT, verifiable via fleet_conserved.
• Item 17 (§XVI.2) — does Hera's suicide replace BYE's current cold-restart, or become a separate word? Small, but it changes a live registered word either way.
• Item 18 (§XVI.7) — if Hera is already dead, nobody performs the halt. Proposed shape (an empty floor as a kernel-observable condition) is analysis, not a ruling.

§XIII.5's proposed Console resolution shape remains analysis, not a ruling. §XIV.4's and §XIV.5's proposals were both superseded by §XV.4 and §XV.3 respectively.

What is decided, all by Captain Bob on 2026-09-18 and recorded in §III.1, §IV.1, §V.1, §VI.1, §VII.1, §VII.2, §VIII.1 and §IX.1: Hermes goes into the kernel and becomes the arbiter rather than a client; the Tripod becomes Hera/Artemis/Console; Console becomes the bind point; BIRTH is general with authority bounded by inheritance; the fleet shares one gentle→from-scratch→brutal ladder; SOS is a standard message type with Hermes excepted via a sinking semaphore; and a failed birther's authority is never provisionally handed off.

---

XIII. Punch-list items 1 and 2 worked — CLOSED 2026-09-18, with three corrections to this document's own §I

Worked per the series' standing discipline: items 1 and 2 were the two pure-investigation entries on §XI, carrying no design commitment, so they were executable without a ruling. All findings below traced directly against the working tree at e56974e on 2026-09-18. No code written, no design question answered, nothing in the tree modified.

XIII.1 — Item 1 CLOSED: the by-name Hermes inventory. §I.2 undercounted by an order of magnitude.

Correction to §I.2, which is wrong as written. It claimed the by-name dependency was Artemis's "two live call sites" and framed Artemis as the dependent. The real inventory is 13 by-name FORTH references across 5 files, plus 3 independent C-side sites. §I.2's two sites are real and still the sharpest edge, but they are not the extent of it, and the executive framing ("relocated and rewired") has to cover all of it. Full inventory:

#	Site	Call	Live?
1	common/msg.4th:7	S" MSG-ACK-LAST" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	dead — §XIII.2
2	common/msg.4th:10	S" MSG-NACK-LAST" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	dead — §XIII.2
3	artemis/init.4th:138	S" 2 ENQUEUE-READY" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	live
4	artemis/init.4th:501	S" 2 COMMON-CH @ CH-ADD-MBR" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	live
5	process.4th:12	S" 1 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC (SPAWN)	dead — §XIII.2
6	process.4th:15	S" 2 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC (PAUSE)	dead
7	process.4th:21	S" 3 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC (RESUME)	dead
8	process.4th:26	S" 4 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC (KILL-VM)	dead
9	doe-campaign.4th:6	S" Hermes" BIRTH	not auto-run
10	doe-campaign.4th:7	S" LOAD-DOE" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	not auto-run
11	doe-campaign.4th:17	S" DOE-WORK" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	not auto-run
12	doe-campaign.4th:28	S" DOE-WORK" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	not auto-run
13	doe-campaign.4th:54	S" 1959 1 EXEC-DOE" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC	not auto-run
14	messaging.4th:77	S" Hermes" 1 VM-NAME-REG	live (§I.3)

The good news is real: only 3 of the 14 are live production paths (#3, #4, #14). Seven are dead code (§XIII.2), four are in a campaign orchestrator docs/working/architecture/ DOE-LIBRARY-HOWTO-20260819.md itself records as "Not auto-run anywhere." This materially lowers the estimated cost of §III.3 — but it must be re-confirmed rather than trusted, since "not auto-run" is a claim about today's boot path, not a guarantee nothing invokes it.

XIII.2 — Seven of those sites are dead code, and MANIFEST.md carries a claim FABRIC-2 already declared stale

common/msg.4th is loaded by nothing. Traced: S" common:msg.4th" EXEC appears exactly once in the tree — inside common/msg.4th's own header comment, as usage documentation. No capsule EXECs it. capsules/init.4th (block 2049) loads ACL.4th, block-acl.4th, zuse-eligibility.4th, lib.4th, fabric.4th, font.4th, common:messaging.4th — and nothing else.

This is already known and already written down. FABRIC-2.md:2770-2773 states it outright: the HERMES-ACK/HERMES-NACK wrappers "are now obsolete (every VM has its own local MSG-ACK-LAST/MSG-NACK-LAST — no VM-EXEC indirection needed) but the file itself was left in place, unloaded, rather than deleted unprompted; capsules/MANIFEST.md's 'immutable ABI' claim for block 4055 is now stale." messaging.4th:411 carries the same note from the other side: "common:msg.4th's HERMES-ACK/NACK indirection is retired."

capsules/MANIFEST.md was never corrected. Line 317 still reads: "Immutable: this is the cross-VM ACK/NACK ABI. Every messaging VM (Hera, Hermes, Artemis) loads this at birth. Changing the block or the word names breaks the Hermes delivery protocol." That is false on every clause. A second MANIFEST claim also fails against the source: line 52 describes block 2049 as loading "compudynamics, VM-INIT, lib, common:msg, fleet-k, process; BIRTHs Artemis + Hermes" — init.4th block 2049 loads none of common:msg/process and contains no BIRTH at all (Hermes and Artemis are birthed from C — §XIII.3).

process.4th is likewise EXEC'd nowhere, making sites #5–#8 dead with it.

Reported, not fixed, per Captain Bob's Law ("if you identify a bug, report it; do not fix it unless the user says to"). Flagged here because a reshuffle that reads MANIFEST.md as current will conclude the ACK/NACK path is a live immutable Hermes ABI and scope around a constraint that stopped existing in FABRIC-2.md's era. Recommend a MANIFEST.md correction pass as its own authorized item; it is not part of this reshuffle.

XIII.3 — The Tripod is hardcoded as a name-triple in C, in three independent places

Not previously recorded in this document. Each is an edit site the moment the Tripod's membership changes (§IV.1):

1. capsule_birth.c:793-796 — is_fleet_foundation is literally vm_name_prefix_eq_nocase(capsule_name, "Hera") || ... "Hermes" || ... "Artemis". It gates StadiumPatronHeader setup and the session_register()/session_set_pinned() pinning calls. This is the Tripod, encoded as a string test. Swapping Hermes for Console is a one-line change here — and that single line is what makes a VM pinned.
2. kernel_main.c:864-874 — vm_interpret(mama, "S\" Hermes\" BIRTH") plus a capsule_vm_find_by_name_nocase("Hermes", ...) liveness check and console banner. The comment cites FABRIC-2.md D.7 (birth-by-message-only, 2026-08-28): the Tripod legs "must be alive session-less so a later thumbdrive-attach flow has a running Hermes/Artemis to message." Note the stated rationale for Hermes being born early is precisely that other flows need it available — which a kernel-resident arbiter satisfies trivially and permanently. §III is consistent with D.7's intent, not in tension with it.
3. kernel_main.c:1007-1009 — sk_vm_switch_signal_register(hermes_entry.vm_id), the preemptive context-switch registration from FABRIC-3.md §XXVIII.

A fourth site is not code but schema, and is the expensive one: doe_log.c. The per-tick DoE CSV hardcodes the Tripod across six columns — 16/17/18 (hera_heat_q48, hermes_heat_q48, artemis_heat_q48, populated by doe_log_heat_by_name("Hera"/"Hermes"/ "Artemis") at lines 206-208) and 23/24/25 (switch_*_readiness), with column 22 documented as "0=Hera, 1=Hermes, 2=Artemis by current registration order." Changing Tripod membership changes the DoE CSV schema, which bears directly on comparability with every campaign already run (§XXXIV/§XXXV's segmented per-ISA design in FABRIC-3.md is mid-flight). Flagged as a real cost, not a blocker, and not something to resolve by quietly renaming a column.

XIII.4 — Item 2 CLOSED: all three flagged citations verified against source

§XI item 2 flagged three citations this document took from headings and .claude/CLAUDE.md rather than from the source. All three check out; §V.3.4 and §VII.4 may now be relied on.

• FABRIC-2.md §H.1 — real, at line 3699, "Session = Stadium patron, admission restated." The pinning claim is at line 3713: pinned sessions are exempt from "the normal departure path (heat decay / COOL): they never leave, permanently." Confirmed as §V.3.4 used it.
• FABRIC-2.md §H.12 — real, at line 4057, "Implementation punch list (2026-09-03)." Independently corroborated from the code side: capsule_birth.c:785-788 cites "§H.12 step 4" by name for the session_register()/session_set_pinned() soft-fail convention.
• FABRIC-3.md §XVIII — confirmed. K is vm_physics_fleet_heat_sum() over all live VMs, which the reservoir-transfer accounting holds exactly at Q48_ONE, surfaced as the fleet_k_q48/fleet_conserved CSV columns. §VII.4's warning stands as written: a brutal death must still return what it held, or it breaks a continuously-verified invariant.

XIII.5 — New finding, and the most consequential of this pass: Console today is plural, ephemeral, and capsule-less

This was not known to §IV or §V when they were written, and it changes what §IV.1 is asking for. Traced in capsule_console.c:

• Console has no capsule. capsules/ contains hermes/ and artemis/ directories but no console/. A console VM's entire personality is a 3-line C string literal, CONSOLE_IDENTITY_SRC (capsule_console.c:28-31): Block 4997, S" common:messaging.4th" EXEC, MSG-CD-INIT. That is all of it.
• Console is deliberately not on the routing table. The source comment is explicit: "No COMMON-CH subscription: a console's own traffic is direct 1:1 with its paired user VM (CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT), not broadcast, so there's no need to resolve an index in Hermes's own routing table for it."
• Console is plural and per-attach. capsule_console_birth(const char *console_name, ...) is called from three sites (capsule_wirebind.c:245, mama_forth_words.c:1591 and :2015) and mints a fresh heap-built single-entry capsule directory each time. There are as many console VMs as there are attachments.

Consequence. Hera, Hermes and Artemis are singular, pinned, born-at-boot, capsule-backed, routing-table-indexed. Console today is none of those five things. So §IV.1's "Console takes the vacated third slot" is not a relocation of an existing pinned VM — as stated it would create a Console that does not currently exist. That is worth naming plainly, because it is the one place this document's "reorganization, not invention" scope discipline is genuinely strained.

The shape that resolves it without inventing anything — offered as analysis, not ratified, Captain Bob's call: distinguish Console (singular, pinned, capsule-backed, the Tripod leg — owns the drawing fabric and is the bind point, per §V.1) from console proxies (plural, ephemeral, per-attach — exactly what capsule_console_birth() mints today, unchanged). The Tripod leg is new; the proxies are untouched. This reading makes §V.1's "bind point" precise: the leg is what you bind to, the proxy is what binding produces.

XIII.6 — §V and §VI are load-bearing for each other, which neither section noticed

If Console is the bind point (§V.1), it is Console that must mint console proxies — and minting a VM is BIRTH. Today all three capsule_console_birth() call sites run in Hera's or the caller's context. So "Console is the bind point" cannot be implemented while BIRTH remains Hera-exclusive; it requires §VI.1's generalization. They are one change, not two.

Mechanically this already works, which strengthens both: two of the three call sites pass vm->stadium_vm_id — whichever VM invoked — rather than a hardcoded Hera (capsule_wirebind.c:245 passes mama_vm->stadium_vm_id because that path genuinely is Hera's). That matches §I.5's finding that capsule_birth_baby() treats stadium_vm_id generically as "whoever is birthing this VM." Parentage is already generic; only registration is not.

This also supplies the first concrete answer to §VI.4's open "what is standing": Console needs BIRTH to do its declared job, so it has standing by role. That is evidence for reading (a) (standing = having BIRTH registered), not a ruling.

XIII.7 — Effect on §X's sequencing

Nothing found here dislodges §III.4 as the root dependency. Two adjustments:

• §III.3 is cheaper than §I.2 implied (3 live sites, not a broad web) and can be scoped as soon as §III.4 lands.
• §IV.1 needs a prior ruling that §IV.2 does not cover: is the Tripod's Console leg a new singleton distinct from today's proxies (§XIII.5)? That question sits above the slot numbering, not beside it. Added to the punch list as item 12.

XIII.8 — Punch-list status after this pass

• ✅ Item 1 CLOSED — inventory complete (§XIII.1), 14 FORTH sites + 3 C sites + 1 CSV schema site; §I.2 corrected.
• ✅ Item 2 CLOSED — all three citations verified against source (§XIII.4).
• ⬜ Item 12, NEW — rule on §XIII.5: is the Console Tripod leg a new singleton, distinct from today's per-attach proxies? Gates §IV.1 and §IV.2.
• ⬜ Item 13, NEW, not part of this reshuffle — authorize a capsules/MANIFEST.md correction pass for the two false claims in §XIII.2 (block 4055 "immutable ABI"; block 2049 contents). Reported, not fixed.

Items 3–11 unchanged and still open.

---

XIV. Two rulings that collapse the root dependency (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

XIV.1 — RULING: the existing FORTH messaging layer is legacy. Kernel Hermes is greenfield.

Captain Bob, 2026-09-18, verbatim: "as far as Hermes the VM and Hermes the kernel component, forget all the forth existing and call it legacy for now. We'll do a code cleanup for all the dead FORTH anyway."

So kernel-Hermes is not a migration of capsules/common/messaging.4th. It is a new C implementation; the FORTH messaging layer becomes legacy on arrival and is retired by a separate dead-FORTH cleanup pass. This reverses the framing §III.3 and §III.4 were built on — both assumed the existing FORTH had to be carried across.

XIV.2 — What this collapses

Four of this document's open questions dissolve rather than get answered:

• §III.4 (the root dependency) — RESOLVED by fiat, in the "full centralization" direction, but without the migration cost that made it frightening. The kernel owns message and channel state; messaging.4th's per-VM CREATE/ALLOT arenas are legacy, not something to centralize. §III.4 feared a painful port of live FORTH state; there is no port.
• §III.3 (the by-name VM-EXEC dependency) — dissolved. The three-option framing (kernel primitives / vestigial name / birth-time registration) was about preserving callers. With the FORTH legacy, §XIII.1's 14-site inventory stops being a migration constraint and becomes an input to the cleanup pass. §XIII.1's inventory is still the right list — its purpose changed, not its content.
• §IV.2 (routing-table slot numbering) — dissolved, exactly as §IV.2's own option 3 predicted: "the routing table stops being a FORTH array at all... in which case this question dissolves into §III.4's arena question." It did. VM-NAMES-INIT's 0/1/2 pinning and the "never renumbered" commitment are legacy artifacts, not constraints on the new design.
• §XI item 13 (the MANIFEST.md corrections) — absorbed. Bob's "we'll do a code cleanup for all the dead FORTH anyway" covers §XIII.2's findings. Still worth doing deliberately; no longer a separate ask.

§XIII.1, §XIII.2 and §XIII.3 keep their value — the C-side sites (§XIII.3) are not legacy and remain real edit sites, and the dead-FORTH inventory now feeds the cleanup.

XIV.3 — RULING: Artemis is the persistence path. And it needs no layering inversion.

Captain Bob, 2026-09-18: "For persistence though, use Artemis as much as possible. We're good with that part for sure." Ratified.

A layering question this raises, traced 2026-09-18 and answered cleanly. Artemis is a VM on the Stadium floor; kernel-Hermes sits below the floor. "Persist via Artemis" reads at first like an inversion — the kernel arbiter calling up into a floor VM. It is not, because storage is already two layers, not one:

• The block subsystem is kernel/shared C, below the floor: src/block_subsystem.c, src/blkio_*.c, src/starkernel/virtio/virtio_blk.c. capsule_loader.c:98-100 calls blk_subsys_init() and blk_subsys_add_raw_device() directly, with no Artemis involved at all.
• Artemis is the storage policy arbiter on the floor: it owns attach/registration (blk_subsys_attach_device() via the BLK-ATTACH primitive — repl.c:525-531 states it outright, "Artemis's own domain now, not Hera's") and the on-disk Artemis format.

So the ruling is satisfiable without inversion, by keeping the two straight: floor-level and fleet persistence goes through Artemis, its domain and its format; anything kernel-Hermes itself needs uses the same block subsystem Artemis is built on — never a new one, and never by messaging Artemis.

Worth recording that the kernel already calls up into Artemis by name today (repl.c:539-541, S" %llu HERA-BLK-ATTACH-REQ" S" Artemis" VM-EXEC), with a comment explaining it is a direct VM-EXEC rather than a real message because Hera can't use her own MSG-SEND there. That precedent exists; this section is about not depending on it.

XIV.4 — The one real hazard in the persistence ruling, and the shape that avoids it

Kernel-Hermes must not depend on Artemis for the persistence it needs during its own failure. This is the same structural trap as §VIII: if Hermes must write something at death and reaching Artemis requires routing, the dependency closes a circle on exactly the mechanism that is broken. §VIII solved the signalling case with a semaphore; the persistence case needs the same discipline rather than a second special case.

Recommended shape — analysis, not a ruling, Captain Bob's call: kernel-Hermes holds only reconstructible state. If the arbiter's routing state can be rebuilt from the live VM registry (which capsule_birth.c already maintains as the authority on who exists), then:

• Hermes has nothing that must be persisted, so the Artemis dependency never arises.
• §VII.4's "what does warm restart mean for Hermes" becomes trivial — rebuild from the registry, no saved state to reconcile.
• Losing in-flight messages when the arbiter dies is consistent with §VII.1 step 3's "no lingering, no partial states," and with §VIII's clean-shutdown window.

This costs message durability across an arbiter death. Flagged as the real trade, and the one to rule on: if in-flight messages must survive Hermes dying, Hermes needs durable state, and that durable state cannot route through Artemis at death-time.

XIV.5 — Still open, and now more urgent, not less: the scheduler firewall

Raised 2026-09-18 and not yet ruled on. Recorded here because §XIV.1 changes its timing.

The fleet already has a scheduler: §XXVIII built timer-driven preemption, and MSG-SEND (messaging.4th block 5021) already calls SWITCH-MARK-WORK → sk_vm_switch_signal_mark_work(), setting has_work on the target's switch slot; sk_vm_switch_signal_tick() switches when readiness >= SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD and has_work. Message arrival is already a scheduling input. This directly contradicts VM-PHYSICS-DYNAMIC-FLEET-DESIGN-20260705.md's "Explicitly not wanted: a VM scheduler. Nothing gets built that decides whose turn it is to execute" — a live tension in the project that predates this document and is not this document's to resolve, but is this document's to not make worse.

Why §XIV.1 sharpens it. Today that coupling runs FORTH MSG-SEND → C primitive → switch slot. With the FORTH legacy, kernel-Hermes becomes the caller of sk_vm_switch_signal_mark_work() directly — eligibility marking moves inside the arbiter. That is the consolidation to guard against, and it happens by default unless the boundary is stated up front. Greenfield is the right time to state it; retrofitting it later is how this becomes a conventional scheduler by accident.

Proposed invariant, for ruling: kernel-Hermes carries, resolves and ACL-checks. It publishes facts — "this VM has mail" — and never reads readiness, never orders traffic by priority, and never decides turn order. switch.c remains the sole owner of "who runs next."

The argument for it is empirical and from this project's own history: §XXVIII.2 is a record of switch-storms caused by two sources of truth disagreeing about who was running (vm_log_attributed_vm() vs. the real trampoline state) — QEMU pinned near 100%, serial log frozen solid. This codebase punishes duplicated authority with hangs. Two deciders would be worse than one scheduler.

XIV.6 — Punch list after these rulings

• ✅ Item 3 (§III.4, the root) — RESOLVED by §XIV.1. Kernel owns messaging; FORTH is legacy.
• ✅ Item 4 (§III.3) — DISSOLVED by §XIV.1; §XIII.1's inventory becomes cleanup input.
• ✅ Item 5 (§IV.2) — DISSOLVED by §XIV.1, as §IV.2 option 3 predicted.
• ✅ Item 13 — ABSORBED into the dead-FORTH cleanup pass.
• ⬜ Item 14, NEW — rule on §XIV.5's scheduler firewall invariant. Raised, not ruled.
• ⬜ Item 15, NEW — rule on §XIV.4: does message durability survive an arbiter death? If yes, Hermes needs durable state that cannot route through Artemis at death-time.
• ⬜ Items 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 unchanged and still open.

Note the shape of what remains. With the root dependency resolved, the surviving open items are no longer about mechanism — they are about authority: who may birth (6, 7), who decides a VM is dead (8, 11), who owns turn order (14), and what survives a death (15). That is a better class of question to be left with, and §IX's "authority only ever flows down the birth graph" is the principle most of them should be tested against.

---

XV. The authority questions, answered (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

§XIV.6 observed that the surviving open items were no longer about mechanism but about authority — who may birth, who declares a VM dead, who owns turn order, what survives a death. All four are answered here, and three of the four are answered by rejecting the question's premise rather than by naming an owner. That pattern is the finding.

XV.1 — RULING: any VM may birth a near-clone of itself, carrying its own ACL DNA

Captain Bob, verbatim: "Any VM can birth another VM that is almost a clone of itself with its own ACL DNA whatever ya wanna call it."

This closes §VI.3 and §VI.4 together:

• §VI.3 ("ACL/DNA" needs a precise referent) — ANSWERED: inheritance by copy, from the parent. The child is almost a clone of its birther: it starts from the parent's own state and carries its own DNA — a copy it owns and may diverge, not a shared reference to the parent's. This is the reading §VI.3 hoped for: it uses the existing word-level ACL-INHERIT semantics (pin cleared, mode copied) rather than inventing a VM-level construct, so it stays inside the "reorganization, not invention" scope, and it does not need a fifth acl_* field on DictEntry (the constraint §VI.3 flagged).
• §VI.4 ("standing" is undefined) — ANSWERED: standing is decorative. "Any VM can birth" confirms reading (a) — standing means nothing more than having BIRTH registered. Per §I.5 the C implementation is already VM-agnostic, so this is a registration change, exactly as §VI.2 predicted. No Stadium-economy gate, no ACL.4th predicate. Consistent with .claude/CLAUDE.md's "do not over-engineer — if the user says 'BIRTH is a primitive', that is the complete specification."

Why the authority bound still holds without a check. A near-clone cannot exceed its parent because it is built from the parent. §VI.1's "enforced by inheritance, not by a separate authorization check" is therefore literal, not aspirational — there is no gate to bypass because there is no gate.

XV.2 — RULING: nobody declares a VM dead. It dies a compudynamic death.

Captain Bob, verbatim: "Nobody declares a VM dead, it died a compudynamic death."

This rejects the premise of §IX.3 and of §VII.3's detection gap, and both were wrong to ask what they asked. §IX.3 asked "what has standing to declare a birther dead?" and called it "circular by construction." The circularity was an artifact of assuming death is a judgment someone renders. It is not: death is a physical outcome of the compudynamics — heat exhausts, the reservoir empties, the patron leaves the Stadium floor. There is no detector, no quorum, no supervisor, and nothing to build.

This retires the largest scheduler-shaped risk in the whole design. §VII's ladder appeared to need a supervisor — some component watching liveness and deciding to escalate — and §XIV.5 warned that a supervisor with a timer is a scheduler's twin. With death compudynamic, that component does not exist and is not needed. The ladder is self-applied while a VM is alive; once it is dead it is dead, which is exactly §VII.1 step 3's "fast and total, not a slow degrade." No actor, no handoff (§IX.1 already forbade one), no partial states.

Consequence for §VII.3. The "wellness check at the nearest participating wellness center" idea recorded in FABRIC-3.md §XX does not need to be reconciled with this ladder as a detection mechanism, because no detection mechanism is required. It remains an independent idea on its own merits. §VII.3's framing ("a ladder with no detection story only fires on failures loud enough to notice by accident") was built on the same wrong premise and is withdrawn.

XV.3 — RULING: nobody owns turn order. Turn order is compudynamic.

Captain Bob, verbatim: "Nobody owns the turn order. The turn order is compudynamic."

This answers §XIV.5 (item 14) with a stronger invariant than the one proposed there. §XIV.5 suggested a firewall — "switch.c remains the sole owner of who runs next." That named an owner, and naming an owner is what a conventional scheduler is. The correct invariant names none:

Turn order is an emergent output of the compudynamics, not a decision any component makes. Kernel-Hermes publishes facts into that system — "this VM has mail" — and computes no ordering. Neither does anything else.

This is consistent with the project's own standing position, independently of this document: FABRIC-3.md §XIX records the design direction as "fix the gap without a scheduler," with the reasoning that "a fixed round-robin across identities would just be a different hardcoded policy — not in the spirit of" the design. §XV.3 is that same position restated for the reshuffle.

One honest observation, offered as a flag rather than an objection. Traced 2026-09-18: sk_vm_switch_signal_tick() gates on readiness >= SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD && has_work, and SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD is 50u, a hardcoded constant (capsule_vm_switch_signal.c:52). That is a fixed policy sitting in the middle of a mechanism this section calls compudynamic — the same category §XIX rejected as "a different hardcoded policy."

The layering does reconcile: the compudynamic turn-attractor (§XIX/§XXI) decides what work is assigned, and the CPU-level switch signal is the mechanical follower that moves the processor. Turn order in the meaningful sense is the attractor, and it is compudynamic as ruled. But the constant 50 is a real seam, and it is the exact place where a hardcoded policy could quietly start deciding turns. Flagged for later, not proposed as work here — it predates this reshuffle and is FABRIC-3.md §XXVIII's own territory. Noted so it is not discovered later and mistaken for something this document introduced. (FABRIC-4.md §1's fixed-then-adaptive rate graduation is the precedent for how such a constant earns its way to adaptive: measure against a fixed baseline first, self-tune only after.)

XV.4 — §XIV.4 reframed: the question was persistence; the answer is conservation

§XIV.4 asked whether in-flight messages must survive an arbiter's death, and warned that answering "yes" would force Hermes to hold durable state it could not safely write through Artemis at death-time. Captain Bob, on that item: "What survives the death of what? I don't understand that last part." Fair — it was posed as a persistence question, which is the wrong frame and the reason it read as opaque.

The right frame, given §XV.2. A message is not only content; it is heat. Traced 2026-09-18 in capsules/common/messaging.4th: MSG-ALLOC pulls Q.SLOT from the caller's own reservoir before admitting a message (rolling back via STADIUM-RES-PUSH on refusal, line 127), and MSG-FREE-NODE releases it with STADIUM-EVICT (line 135-136). An arbiter dying while holding N messages is holding N × Q.SLOT of fleet heat.

So the question is not "must the payloads be saved." It is:

Does a dying arbiter return the heat its undelivered messages were holding?

• Payloads may vanish. Consistent with §VII.1 step 3's "no lingering, no partial states."
• The heat may not. K = vm_physics_fleet_heat_sum() is held at Q48_ONE and continuously verified (FABRIC-3.md §XVIII, fleet_k_q48/fleet_conserved). Heat that dies with the arbiter is heat that breaks a live invariant.

The answer to "what survives the death of what" is therefore: nothing survives except K.

This dissolves §XIV.4's hazard rather than resolving it. There is nothing to persist, so there is no death-time write, so there is no circular dependency on Artemis, so the stateless-arbiter shape §XIV.4 recommended is simply correct rather than a trade-off. And since death is compudynamic (§XV.2), a VM's death is already a Stadium eviction event — returning heat is not a special case bolted onto death, it is what dying consists of. §XIV.3's "Artemis for persistence" ruling stands untouched and applies to fleet/floor persistence; the arbiter simply never needed any.

The one thing to verify when this is eventually built (not a design question, an implementation check): that every message-holding structure's teardown path actually reaches STADIUM-EVICT, so a mass teardown returns heat rather than leaking it. fleet_conserved already makes that directly testable — a leak shows up as K ≠ Q48_ONE, not as a silent error. Added as punch item 16.

XV.5 — What these four rulings have in common

Three of the four answers reject the question rather than answer it. There is no death declarer, no turn-order owner, and nothing to persist — and in each case the thing that seemed to need an authority turned out to be an outcome of the physics instead. The one question that was answered directly (§XV.1, who may birth) was answered with "anyone," which also declines to create an authority.

That is the actual defence against becoming a conventional scheduler, and it is stronger than the firewall §XIV.5 proposed. A firewall constrains a component that owns something. These rulings mean there is no owner to constrain. The design's protection is structural, not procedural: authority only ever flows down the birth graph (§IX.2), and everything else — death, turn order, conservation — is physics rather than policy.

XV.6 — Punch list after these rulings

• ✅ Item 6 (§VI.3, "ACL/DNA" referent) — ANSWERED (§XV.1): inheritance by copy; existing ACL-INHERIT semantics suffice; no fifth DictEntry field.
• ✅ Item 7 (§VI.4, "standing") — ANSWERED (§XV.1): decorative; reading (a) confirmed.
• ✅ Item 8 (§VII.3, ladder vs. detection) — WITHDRAWN (§XV.2): premise wrong, no detection mechanism required.
• ✅ Item 11 (§IX.3, who declares a birther dead) — PREMISE REJECTED (§XV.2): nobody; compudynamic death.
• ✅ Item 14 (§XIV.5, scheduler firewall) — ANSWERED (§XV.3), with a stronger invariant than the one proposed: no owner, not a named owner.
• ✅ Item 15 (§XIV.4, message durability) — DISSOLVED (§XV.4): reframed from persistence to conservation; nothing survives but K.
• ⬜ Item 16, NEW (§XV.4) — implementation check, not a design question: verify every message-holding teardown path reaches STADIUM-EVICT so mass teardown returns heat. Testable directly via fleet_conserved.
• ⬜ Item 9 (§VII.2 — SOS message-type number and its consumer) — still open. Note §XV.2 narrows it: with no death-declarer, an SOS consumer cannot be a supervisor, so the question is now specifically what a peer does on receipt.
• ⬜ Item 10 (§VIII.3 — the sinking semaphore's mechanism, the clean-shutdown routine's definition, and whether the window is bounded) — still open, and now the largest remaining design item.
• ⬜ Item 12 (§XIII.5 — is the Console Tripod leg a new singleton, distinct from today's per-attach proxies?) — still open, and still gates §IV.

Remaining open: items 9, 10, 12, 16. Item 10 is the substantive one; 9 is downstream of it, 12 is independent, and 16 is a build-time check rather than a decision.

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XVI. Item 10 settled: clean shutdown is forced flush + BYE; Hera's is suicide (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Captain Bob, verbatim: "A clean shutdown is a VM termination where flush is forced and the VM says BYE. Hera is the special case that should just halt the processor. Call it suicide I guess."

This settles §VIII.3's second open point (what a clean-shutdown routine concretely does) and, as a consequence, its third (is the window bounded). Traced 2026-09-18: the ruling is almost entirely existing mechanism, with exactly one behavioural change to a word that already exists.

XVI.1 — Every piece of this already exists

• Forced flush — blk_flush(0). block_subsystem.c:988-990; the source comment states it directly: "0 is the 'flush all' sentinel." Already called that way at block_subsystem.c:849, and already the Stadium's own write-back action for STADIUM_BEHAVIOUR_MIGRATE (stadium.c:336, :373). Nothing new to build.
• A child VM's BYE — system_word_bye() (src/word_source/system_words.c:143-147): sets vm->halted = 1, signalling the REPL to stop. That is already precisely "a VM termination." Confirmed by mama_forth_words.c:2262-2263's own doc comment: "In child VMs this word is never registered; children use the standard system_word_bye which sets vm->halted and returns to the parent's REPL."
• Halting the processor — arch_halt(), declared at include/starkernel/arch.h:64 and implemented on all three architectures (amd64/arch.c:207, aarch64/arch.c:126, riscv64/arch.c:170). Three-arch parity already holds, so the non-negotiable acceptance criteria are satisfiable without new per-arch work.

So a child VM's clean shutdown is blk_flush(0) then BYE — two existing calls in sequence. This sits comfortably inside the "reorganization, not invention" scope discipline.

XVI.2 — The one real change: Hera's BYE does not currently halt. It cold-restarts.

This is the finding of this section, and it is a behavioural change to a live, registered word — not a gap to fill. mama_word_bye() (mama_forth_words.c:2265-2271) is Hera's own BYE, and its doc comment says outright: "Hera-only: reap all children then cold-restart the machine." The body is exactly two actions:

capsule_vm_kill_all_nonmama();   /* "BYE: reaping children" */
arch_cold_reset();               /* "BYE: cold restart"     */

Against Bob's ruling:

• capsule_vm_kill_all_nonmama() already matches the "fleet shuts down" half. (The contract is documented downstream too — include/starkernel/capsule_birth.h:339 describes it as called "from Hera's BYE immediately before arch_cold_reset() to reap all children.")
• arch_cold_reset() does not match. The ruling is halt, not restart. A cold reset reboots the machine; suicide stops it. These are opposite outcomes, and today's code does the wrong one.

Implementation shape, traced: arch_cold_reset() is __attribute__((noreturn)) (arch.h:67), but arch_halt() is not — it halts only until the next interrupt and is called once per idle iteration in normal use (amd64/arch.c:200-205's own comment). A permanent halt is therefore arch_disable_interrupts() followed by a for(;;) arch_halt(); loop — which is exactly the pattern amd64's own arch_cold_reset() already uses as its unreachable fallback (for (;;) __asm__ volatile ("cli; hlt");, arch.c:218) and the same shape the kernel panic path uses. No new primitive; an existing pattern applied deliberately.

Flagged for a conscious decision, not resolved here. .claude/CLAUDE.md carries a hard rule: "Never modify a registered, tested word to 'fix' it." This is not a fix — it is a ruled behavioural change — which is a different thing, and the rule's own reasoning ("the problem is almost certainly in the caller") does not apply. But the change is real and should be made knowingly rather than discovered in a diff. Whether Hera's suicide is spelled as a changed BYE or as a separate word leaving BYE's cold-restart intact is an implementation choice, and is not decided here. Worth noting that cold-restart-on-BYE is plausibly wanted behaviour for an interactive operator typing BYE at Hera's REPL, which is an argument for two words rather than one.

XVI.3 — A shared-source constraint on where the flush goes

system_word_bye() lives in src/word_source/system_words.c — vendored/shared source that must compile and behave correctly in the hosted build as well as the kernel (.claude/CLAUDE.md: gate kernel-only code with #ifdef __STARKERNEL__). Forcing a blk_flush(0) inside system_word_bye() itself would change hosted-build behaviour for a word that has nothing to do with this design.

So the forced flush belongs in the kernel-side shutdown path that calls BYE, not inside BYE. Stated here as a constraint on implementation so the obvious-looking edit is not made in the obvious-looking place.

XVI.4 — §VIII.3's third question answers itself: Hera's halt is the bound

§VIII.3 asked whether the shutdown window is bounded, noting that "holds it until it goes down" gives no deadline. It is bounded, and by construction rather than by a timer: the window ends when Hera halts the processor. Children flush and say BYE; Hera reaps whatever remains and stops the machine. There is no deadline to choose, no timeout to tune, and — consistent with §XV.3 — nothing that has to decide when time is up. The sequence terminates because its last step is physically terminal.

This also satisfies §VII.1 step 3's "no lingering, no partial states" literally: after arch_halt() in a disabled-interrupt loop there is no state left to linger in.

XVI.5 — Item 9 is now half-answered

§VII.2 left two questions on SOS: which message-type number, and "who consumes an SOS, and what do they do with it?" The second is answered for the two fleet-fatal cases: on Hermes's sinking semaphore (§VIII.1) and on total birther failure (§IX.1), the response is now concrete — forced flush, BYE, and Hera's suicide as the terminal step.

Still genuinely open, and narrower than before: what a peer does on receiving an ordinary VM's SOS. A single non-Tripod VM in trouble is presumably not fleet-fatal, so "everyone shuts down" cannot be the universal answer — but §XV.2 rules out the obvious alternative, since with no death-declarer an SOS consumer cannot be a supervisor that decides another VM's fate. The remaining question is therefore specifically: is a peer's SOS actionable at all, or is it purely advisory/diagnostic? Plus the trivial number allocation (§I.4: 5 and 6 are unallocated gaps, 10 is next in sequence).

XVI.6 — Punch list after this ruling

• ✅ Item 10 (§VIII.3) — SETTLED (§XVI). Clean shutdown = blk_flush(0) + BYE; Hera = suicide via a permanent arch_halt() loop. Window bounded by Hera's halt (§XVI.4). All mechanism exists on all three architectures.
• 🔶 Item 9 (§VII.2) — HALF-ANSWERED (§XVI.5). Consumer action defined for the two fleet-fatal cases. Open: whether a peer SOS is actionable or advisory, plus the number.
• ⬜ Item 12 (§XIII.5) — Console Tripod leg: new singleton or not? Unchanged; still gates §IV.
• ⬜ Item 16 (§XV.4) — implementation check: teardown paths must reach STADIUM-EVICT.
• ⬜ Item 17, NEW (§XVI.2) — decide whether Hera's suicide replaces BYE's cold-restart or becomes a separate word. Small, but it changes a live registered word either way.

XVI.7 — One residual edge, raised not answered

If Hera is already dead, nobody performs the halt. §XV.2 makes death compudynamic and §IX.1 forbids any VM assuming her authority, so on total Hera failure there is no actor left to run arch_halt(). The machine would be a live kernel with an empty Stadium floor — which is precisely the "lingering, partial state" §VII.1 step 3 rules out.

The shape that resolves it without violating §IX: an empty floor is a kernel-observable condition, not a VM's decision. The kernel noticing "no live VMs remain" and halting is not a VM inheriting Hera's authority — it is the machine having nothing left to run. That keeps authority flowing only down the birth graph (§IX.2) while still terminating.

Offered as analysis, not a ruling — Captain Bob's call. Added as punch item 18.