Robert Allan JamesandClaude Sonnet 5
79d160c1ca
Found and fixed a real bug before any campaign work could start: EXEC-DOE's own CSV output was almost entirely lost to console interleaving with the routine per-tick heartbeat export -- same bug class as Section L's PLOT case. Fix: HB-OFF immediately before EXEC-DOE, HB-ON after DOE: complete. Confirmed HB-ON-first (the reverse order) does NOT fix it -- tested directly, row loss recurred identically. Also found: L8-DOE/WL-HI/WL-LO (the mechanism bare_metal/README.md describes as auto-run) don't exist anywhere in capsules/, and Makefile. starkernel's DOE_SEED variable is declared but never referenced -- both vestigial, matching Section K's earlier staleness finding. Built QEMU-serial-socket injection tooling (socat) to drive EXEC-DOE interactively after boot, since it requires live REPL input, not just observation. Two real defects found and fixed in that tooling itself: a log-discovery race (self-excluding the very log it needed to find, causing two separate stuck-injector incidents, one overnight) and an unredirected background launch that deadlocked socat on a full stdout pipe. Both fixed by having the orchestrator pass exact log/socket paths directly and always launching through the harness's tracked-background mechanism. First full campaign attempt ran all 9 cells as three ISA-blocked loops, reusing one build per architecture -- caught mid-run: this confounds ISA with time/session-order, invalidating the Latin square design. Discarded (logs kept as audit artifacts, not treated as valid data) and re-run clean: all 9 (arch, seed) cells in fully randomized order, fresh clean rebuild before every single cell, one continuous sitting. Result: 4,320/4,320 rows captured, zero VM errors anywhere. This validates the campaign mechanism runs cleanly and reproducibly under the post-4.6 Stadium substrate -- satisfies item 5.1's own concern that a green POST suite isn't evidence determinism holds post-migration. It does NOT produce an ACL-RWT overhead number: ACL.4th is not self-activated in this repo's default init.4th, so these 9 cells ran with ACL inactive. Reproducing the original +0.0054%-+0.0088% measurement needs a paired ACL-enabled/disabled run using this now-validated mechanism -- scoped, not attempted here. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LithosAnanke v1.5.4
UEFI-bootable FORTH microkernel. Boots from firmware, initialises memory and interrupts, then runs the StarForth VM as its sole userspace runtime. No libc. No OS. Just stone and necessity.
Lithos (foundation) + Ananke (necessity) — the kernel under StarshipOS.
Status — M7.1 (Capsule System · Multi-VM Fleet)
| Milestone | Status | |
|---|---|---|
| M0–M6 | UEFI boot · PMM · VMM · IDT · APIC · heap · framebuffer VT100 console (v1.5.1-FINAL) | ✅ Complete |
| M7 | StarForth VM integration + parity validation | ✅ Complete |
| M7.1 | Capsule birth protocol · Mama FORTH vocabulary · Tripod multi-VM fleet (Hermes/Artemis) · Word-level ACL (Phases 1–7) | 🔄 In Progress |
| M8 | REPL — keyboard input, interactive Forth | Planned |
| M9 | Block storage — AHCI driver | Planned |
POST at boot: parity hash verified across amd64/aarch64/riscv64 · Mama capsule dictionary: 453 words
What's live in M7.1
- Tripod — a named multi-VM fleet (Hera the Mama VM, Artemis, two Hermes instances) births, runs, and re-births independently, verified booting live pre-REPL on all three architectures.
- Hermes — a 17-block inter-VM messaging/channel layer between fleet members, with async delivery and channel negotiation.
- Artemis — a Block Allocation Map (BAM) storage subsystem with Q48.16
block-heat tracking and cooldown/reclamation (
ART-COOL/ART-REAP). - Word-level ACL — every dictionary entry carries a TTL/allow/mode/pin
access-control record. Strict, TTL, and pinned modes; two console layers
(emergency
ok>and superuserzuse)ok>). Phases 1–7 complete (C infrastructure, FORTH policy layer,zusebootstrap superuser, Isabelle proof stubs, kernel parity); Phase 8 (Ed25519 PKI / thumbdrive challenge-response) is the only item remaining. Measured overhead once active on every check: +0.0054%–+0.0088%, CV = 0.000%, across a 3×3 Latin-square DoE campaign (architecture × seed × 30 replicates) — three orders of magnitude below the measurement floor. - VM Fleet Attractor physics — the L8 Jacquard mode selector now has a real per-VM heat channel into fleet-wide tuning, replacing hardcoded compudynamics constants with a dynamically-inferred rate.
- Kconfig build configuration — every physics/heartbeat/pipelining/ kernel-only tuning knob (~40 total) is now a discoverable, optional Kconfig symbol shared with the hosted VM build. See Quick Start below.
Quick Start
# Build kernel (requires cross-compilation toolchain, or native gcc)
make -f Makefile.starkernel ARCH=amd64
# Run in QEMU with OVMF
make -f Makefile.starkernel qemu
# Other architectures
make -f Makefile.starkernel ARCH=aarch64 qemu
make -f Makefile.starkernel ARCH=riscv64 qemu
Artifacts: build/amd64/kernel/starkernel_loader.efi · build/amd64/kernel/starkernel_kernel.elf
For the hosted VM by itself (Linux, no cross-compiler needed, no bare-metal tooling): see
the separate StarForth repository — LithosAnanke used to be a branch inside that repo,
now it's its own project with its own master.
Build configuration (optional)
Every kernel-only knob (STARFORTH_ENABLE_VM, PARITY_MODE, the shared
physics/heartbeat family, etc.) is an optional Kconfig symbol — a plain
make -f Makefile.starkernel uses the same defaults it always has unless
you opt in:
make -f Makefile.starkernel ARCH=amd64 menuconfig
make -f Makefile.starkernel ARCH=amd64 kernel_amd64_defconfig
Documentation
| System Architecture | Full kernel + VM design |
| HAL Reference | Hardware abstraction layer interfaces |
| Capsule System — M7.1 | Capsule birth protocol design |
| VM Fleet Attractor design log | Tripod/Hermes/Artemis physics + build-system history |
| Getting Started / Kconfig reference | Full symbol reference for both build targets |
| Changelog | Milestone-level history |
| Roadmap | Milestone plan through self-hosting |
License
Starship License 1.0 (SL-1.0) — free for personal, research, and educational use. Commercial use requires a separate agreement. Attribution to R.A. James (Captain Bob) must be preserved in all distributions.
Patent pending. USPTO provisional filed December 2025 — physics-grounded self-adaptive runtime system. This license does not grant patent rights. Licensing inquiries: rajames440@gmail.com
Robert A. James (Captain Bob) · Systems Engineer · Hacking since 1973