D196 - The unknowns are a queue, not a candour exercise

decided · 2026-08-24

Sixty-seven assumptions lines sit across the knowledge files. Individually each is an honest admission; collectively they were unreadable as a body of work - scattered per function, in no order, with no way to ask "what is worth measuring first".

orbistoun-cli questions gathers them and ranks them by how often a guest actually calls the function. Alphabetical is the same as unordered, and the difference is stark: the top entry is sceKernelDirectMemoryQuery at 87.6 million calls, and the tail is functions nothing has ever reached.

Why this is the handoff and not a report

A conformance probe on real hardware can answer these, and until now there was nothing for it to work from. The choice was between a probe author reading the knowledge files by hand and a probe consuming a ranked queue; only one of those survives contact with a thousand exports.

--json exists for that consumer. orbistoun-probe already reads the probe's own protocol and maps a hardware answer to Oracle::Measured - the return path was built before the outbound one, which is the right way round but left the loop open at the near end.

Each entry carries its shape, and that is the point

returns and arity were recorded for trace fidelity. They are also the dispatch key for a property: everything answering a handle can be asked the same questions, and so can everything answering a count. A probe generates tests from the shape without knowing the function, which is what makes broad coverage tractable - a dozen property templates over sixty-six functions rather than sixty-six bespoke tests.

Four kinds are recorded across the base: 39 status, 16 pointer, 9 count, 2 handle. Fifteen entries have no recorded kind, and the queue prints shape unrecorded for them rather than omitting them - a function no property can dispatch on is itself a gap, and hiding it would make the coverage look better than it is.

What it is not

Not a claim that these are all the unknowns. It is every unknown somebody wrote down, which is a strictly smaller set - and the number is expected to rise as more is noticed (D180). A queue that only falls is measuring candour rather than knowledge.