D167 - The video-output handle, and what a large negative sweep is worth

decided · 2026-08-20

A quarter of a million candidate names proposed against seventeen unnamed hashes; one confirmed: libSceVideoOut::0xb9b56b04b654a0ac is sceVideoOutRegisterBuffers2.

That name matters more than the count suggests. It was observed being called with 0x7FFF0001 as its first argument - the guest passing our own unimplemented code back to us as a video-output handle, because sceVideoOutOpen had answered with it. Naming the call is what turns "an unnamed hash got a bad handle" into "the guest registered display buffers against a handle we never gave it".

Buffers was added to the object vocabulary so the repository derives the name from its own grammar rather than from this session having found it. A name confirmed and not written into the vocabulary is an assertion again (D155).

The negative result is the more useful half

Sixteen hashes did not match, across libSceUlt, libSceAgcDriver, libSceAmpr, libScePad, libkernel and libc - and the sweep covered every combination of forty-odd verbs against fifty-odd objects with eight tails, in both verb-object and object-verb order, for every module observed.

So those names are not built from the vocabulary this project has. That is worth knowing precisely: it says extending the current word lists is not the way to reach them, and the effort belongs in a different pattern instead. The most-called one, libc::0xa75420e43cad1cdc at seventy-six calls, sits consistently between sceKernelAllocateMainDirectMemory and sceKernelMapNamedDirectMemory with a stack address as its argument - which is the shape of something building the name string the map call takes. A printf-family name, in other words, and none of the obvious spellings matched.

The sceKernel<posix-name> pattern flagged under D155 is the outstanding idea here: the vendor wrapping standard names, which would derive from the FreeBSD list already harvested rather than from the invented vocabulary. It needs a solver change rather than a data edit, and it is the next thing worth building for naming.