Closes FABRIC-2.md's last open §12 Q5 question. fleet_heartbeat_tick_count is fed by every live VM's own vm_tick(), not one VM's, so it was reaching HEARTBEAT_INFERENCE_FREQUENCY (shared/borrowed from the per-VM inference gate) several times faster than intended with more than one VM live - backwards from FABRIC.md §22.4's required ~1000:1 separation. What's actually gated turned out to be low-stakes: vm_physics_tick() (capsule_vm_physics.c:397) is a passive statistics refit - re-sorts a window of past heat-transfer samples and recomputes a median rate estimate. It doesn't move heat or arbitrate capacity. Firing too often just meant a noisier statistic recomputed more frequently than planned, not incorrect behavior. Considered and explicitly rejected: scaling the threshold by live VM count at the check site. That's the first brick of a scheduler - reading fleet state to adjust a rate dynamically - which this project has deliberately avoided building. Implemented instead: STADIUM_CAPACITY_TICK (existing Kconfig symbol, defined but never read by any code path) now gates vm_physics_heartbeat_tick()'s call directly, replacing the borrowed HEARTBEAT_INFERENCE_FREQUENCY. Default bumped 1000 -> 4000, a flat constant picked once for Tripod's known 4-VM topology, same kind of placeholder as every other frequency knob in Kconfig.kernel - not computed from anything at runtime. Renamed fleet_last_inference_tick -> fleet_last_capacity_tick to match. Still one clock, one counter (fleet_heartbeat_tick_count) - just a bigger flat divisor on it. Three-arch QEMU acceptance: all clean to ok>, identical Stadium conservation invariant on all three (resident_sum=43691 reservoir=21845 sum=65536). logs/20260815-093425/amd64, logs/20260815-093521/aarch64, logs/20260815-093641/riscv64. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
include/starkernel/vm/
Headers for the kernel-side VM subsystem (src/starkernel/vm/).
arena.h— the capsule arena allocator: fixed-region allocation for capsule payload data, separate fromkmalloc's general kernel heap.parity.h— the birth/execution parity-record logger: declares the logging interface used to record VM ID, capsule content hash, and dictionary hash on every capsule birth, enabling offline determinism verification across independent kernel runs.
See include/starkernel/vm/bootstrap/README.md for the VM bootstrap
subsystem.