The entry image is built, and measured out of the running

Followed D152 through. orbistoun-loader::process now builds the System V initial process stack properly - strings, auxiliary vector, environment, arguments, count, sixteen-byte aligned at the count. It is the one part of this project with a genuinely published reference behind it, the target being FreeBSD-derived.

A process cannot be called, which is worth stating because it is not obvious: the pushed return address lands exactly where the argument count must sit, and leaves the stack eight past the alignment the standard requires. So there is a jump-based transfer that never returns. Nothing is lost by that - the fault handler and the time limit each persist the call trace from inside the guest's own thread, and those are the paths that actually fire.

Then the part that matters more than the code: the guest was asked which of it it cares about. Six runs, two conventions by three arguments (D153).

The answer is mostly no. The argument register is load-bearing and binary - zero faults instantly at image+0x7a, any readable pointer gets the full thirty-seven imports and dies at image+0xf2f6. But the real process image and a zeroed block are indistinguishable, and jump and call are indistinguishable - and those two differ in where rsp points and whether the count survives at all. This entry point is not reading the stack image at the point it currently reaches.

So the entry image is eliminated as the wall, not confirmed. That was the leading candidate going in. image+0xf2f6 is still where it dies, and now that is a narrower question than it was this morning.

The image stays: it is correct, tested, costs nothing, and the zero row proves the mechanism is load-bearing even if not yet in the way it was built for.

The config file the paths command has printed since it existed is now actually read. A malformed one fails the run rather than falling back - the failure it prevents is a typo'd setting silently reverting, the run behaving exactly as before, and "that setting has no effect" being recorded as a measurement. For a unit whose entire output is a table of settings against outcomes, that would have poisoned the result.