Three ways of not knowing, kept as three
The network handover gained a sysinfo block: the
target's account of itself - memory, VRAM, generation, firmware - one
record per field, shaped field | state | value. Parsed,
displayed, and kept away from grading.
The state is the record. All three states can carry
the value unknown and they are three different findings:
absent is a platform gap, unconfirmed is the
probe's own unfinished wiring, and known is a real reading.
Only one of them is anybody's bug, and a consumer that collapsed them
would show one blank where there are three.
Modelled as an enum with a fourth variant, Unrecognised,
that resolves to none of the others. A state this version has never seen
cannot be read as absent - that blames the platform for
something it may well do - nor as known, which would treat
unknown confidence as a reading. It stays unrecognised and the decision
surfaces.
And none of it reaches a grade. Inside an emulator
every field answers as that emulator chooses, so
memory|known|441M is that emulator's number wearing the
target's badge - the self-reported-firmware trap one layer along. The
separation is structural: nothing in Origin is reachable
from a record, so it cannot be wired up by accident later.
Surprises
The document does the thing it warns against, once.
It argues at length that collapsing the three states throws away the
only distinction worth showing - then says generation reads
unknown both when neither graphics driver resolves
and when both do. Those are not the same fact: both-resolved is
a positive fingerprint of a stub-everything loader, which is a real
finding about what is on the other end, and neither-resolved is an
absence. They produce identical output today. Raised upstream.
sysinfo|listening|0.0.0.0:9803 is not the
target's self-report. It is the server's own state, sitting in
a record kind framed as "what this machine is". A display rendering the
block faithfully puts a bind address next to VRAM. Minor, and it follows
from the framing rather than from a mistake.
Parsed it and nearly left it unreachable again. The records were read and tested with nothing displaying them - the third time this session a library has been finished without a caller. Their own checklist says to show it. Caught before logging this time rather than by running the tool a day later.