A bundle's verification flags were assertions about methodology that
nothing checked. This makes them conditional on machine-readable
declarations of what the run actually did, and fixes five cases where the
emitter stated something it had not established.
bench/result-schema.json gains a required run_conditions block of ten
closed enumerations -- initialization and mutation path, checkpoint and
index state, index-run ceiling, receipt reconciliation, objects_new
source, commit-id uniqueness, build profile, environment fidelity. It is
not disclosure beside the claims; it is what the claims are conditioned
on, so a harness can only assert what its declaration permits. A prose
caveat field was rejected: free text is not a condition a consumer can
check, and a bundle whose caveats live only in a report reads as
unconditional to everyone who receives it.
The branch conditional forbids the three newly earnable claims on the
journal-drive path and pins its four provenance declarations to the only
values that seam can make. Forbidding the claims alone left the hole one
field over -- a drive bundle could otherwise declare exact receipt
reconciliation it has no receipts to perform.
Emitter defects, each found by reading the schema against the code:
- Setup traffic was inside the measured interval. Both counter baselines
were read only at the end, so repository creation -- which goes through
submit, and therefore fences and signs -- was counted as measured work
while the bundle asserted setup_traffic_excluded. A false exclusion
claim is worse than a wrong number: a wrong number invites scrutiny
and this deflects it.
- A zero-work run produced a schema-valid bundle asserting uniqueness
over zero ids and three-objects-per-commit over zero commits. Both are
vacuously true, which is why they must not be earnable that way: the
result is indistinguishable from a measured run by the consumer the
schema exists to serve. Refused by name at two altitudes.
- An ACK-journal write failure ended the run quietly. It set a stop flag
without recording a refusal, so neither the fatal guard nor the
zero-work guard saw it, and the bundle omitted a committed transaction
while still counting its fence and its signature -- one counted
transaction against two fences and two signings. It is now a fatal
incomplete-accounting refusal carrying the original errno, because the
commit happened: folding it into the refused count would report a
transaction the store committed as one it declined.
- Widening that class to "a failure that produces a value nobody read"
found three more. A shard with no counters summed to zero fences,
silently shrinking the total that bounds every durability claim. A
digest of an unreadable file returned the digest of empty input -- a
well-formed 64-hex value indistinguishable from a real one, feeding
five attested fields. An unreadable /proc/meminfo published one byte
of RAM. All three refuse now.
- Index steady state was inferred from any directory entry, so one stray
file declared the index sealed. Entries are parsed back as index runs
against the root's own uuid; an unparseable entry is reported as
unvalidatable rather than lowering a count, and a backlog is refused
because neither named value describes sealing that did not keep up.
deployment.tmpfs, persistent_data_mount, and hardware.filesystem were
constants -- the emitter could assert deployment facts it had never
checked. They are read from /proc/mounts now. Both deployment fields relax
to booleans so a diagnostic run is representable at all: it was previously
not disqualified but unencodable, and a schema that can only express
successful runs is not a record of what was measured. outcome=pass
requires reference fidelity at every gate, and a diagnostic run may never
carry a pass verdict.
Hardware profiles are derived, never accepted. store-bench parses the
whole frozen profile tables and names a profile only by exact comparison,
iterating every pinned fact rather than every supplied one -- so a fact
the emitter does not model eliminates the profile instead of being
invisible. That took the honest unobserved list on this host from 7 facts
to 24, which is the inversion working. A deployed-node harness supplies
privileged facts as evidence to compare, never as a label. The outcome
derivation now also requires the checkpoint and index conditions, because
fidelity was the only thing preventing a pass and would have stopped being
so the moment profile recognition started working, at which point the
emitter would have produced a pass its own validator rejects.
operation_receipts_reconciled is expressible and deliberately not emitted:
the bench accepts any Committed status without comparing the payload, and
the digest it records is of the operation id rather than the receipt.
Contract review 2026-07-28-C records the amendment and the ceiling it does
not close: run_conditions is self-reported, and only the index-run ceiling
is cross-checked against an independent value. Scope 5.1 records why a
full filesystem is indistinguishable from a concurrency flake by symptom,
and that an I/O error must reach a report with its errno intact -- the
same requirement as the incomplete-accounting refusal above.
scripts/check-phase1.sh GATE_EXIT=0; verify-store-recovery.sh reports
bundle=schema-valid on both paths, zero_work_run=refused, and
unaccounted_ack_run=refused.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Levi Neuwirth
062797d4b8