Robert Allan JamesandClaude Sonnet 5
a8b16d41da
Investigating the std79 lockdown finding from FABRIC-3.md §XXV led to a real discovery: WIREBIND births TWO VMs per identity, a console proxy under the plain username and the actual restricted identity under <username>~user (capsule_wirebind.c). Every test in §XXV targeted the console proxy, which was never locked down at all. Retested against the correct target (rajames~user): the lockdown works exactly as designed. §XXV's "lockdown never engages" conclusion was wrong -- corrected here, not deleted, since the mistake and how it was caught are worth keeping (see the new feedback memory: confirm which specific VM a name resolves to before concluding anything, when a subsystem is known to birth more than one VM per identity). Two real, separate things found along the way are kept regardless of that correction: - capsule_runcap.c: the reserved personality devblock was read in full (mostly zero-padding after a short ~200-byte string) with no terminator, producing "WARN: block 4998 exceeds 1KB, truncating" on every std79-locked identity's birth, universal, since at least 2026-09-10. Fixed by trimming to the first NUL byte actually found -- real, but harmless to execution (real content sat in the truncated block's surviving head); it mattered for capsule_id/ content_hash being computed over padding instead of real content. - console.h/console.c/repl.c: unified the prompt from a separately- computed "[VMName] (user)" into a single "[user@VMName]" line prefix -- exactly the ambiguity that caused the original misdiagnosis (the prompt showed only the WIREBIND username, identical whether USE had targeted the console proxy or the real ~user identity). Implemented as a registered callback (console_set_user_prefix_provider()) rather than console.c calling into WIREBIND/session logic directly, since console.c is a clean HAL module with no prior dependency on capsule-level subsystems. Verified: clean build on all 3 architectures, zero new warnings, identical dict_hash/capsule_hash to every prior boot this session (console/prompt-only change). Full 9-identity messaging campaign re-run end to end: 202s, zero faults, all 8 identities at 99/99 tokens, zero regression. Also surfaced, not yet acted on: the full campaign's own console tags now visibly show which VM each identity's tests actually reached ([zuse@rajames], not [zuse@rajames~user]) -- messaging.4th's VM-NAMES-INIT registers identities by plain username, so std79-doe. fth's turn-attractor has been dispatching to each identity's console proxy, not the actual locked-down identity, since the messaging rewrite. Flagged for a deliberate decision, not investigated further. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EXieurDfDSsDFdnSyusuWo
capsules/
FORTH personality files loaded by the VM at boot. A capsule is an immutable, content-addressed payload; its XXHash64 hash is its identity. Any mutation changes the hash and the birth protocol rejects the image.
Key files
| File | Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
init.4th |
(m) MAMA_INIT |
Default Mama VM personality — loaded at LBN 2048 |
ACL.4th |
user | Word-level ACL system; self-activating at boot |
zuse.4th |
user | Bootstrap superuser; loaded by ACL.4th |
doe.4th |
user | DoE workload words (EXEC-DOE) — opt-in |
workload-0.4th … workload-9.4th |
(p) |
Numbered personality variants |
init-l8-*.4th |
(p) |
L8 Jacquard mode variants (stable/volatile/diverse/temporal/transition/omni) |
hermes/init.4th |
(p) |
Hermes baby VM personality |
artemis/init.4th |
(p) |
Artemis baby VM personality |
Block namespace
Block ranges are shared across all loaded capsules — collisions cause silent word-definition overwrites.
| Range | Owner |
|---|---|
| 2048–2099 | init.4th |
| 2100–2199 | doe.4th |
| 3000–3999 | workload capsules |
| 4000+ | user-defined (ACL.4th, zuse.4th, …) |
Each block is limited to 1024 bytes. Verify with wc -c before committing.
See also
experiments/bare_metal/README.md— DoE protocols and block namespace rulesdocs/03-architecture/word-acl/DESIGN.md— ACL system designtools/mkcapsule.c— assembles capsules intocapsule_generated.c- Project root