A block is a kernel request, as ENGINE.md 3.3 has it: the node puts the
block's number and the address of 256 cells on its stack and writes the
request to port 0, and the kernel leaves the status there. The requests
are -1, read, and -2, write, the same for every node. v4/system/blocks.c
serves them from the kernel's block subsystem, which is v3's. The four
storage registers are gone from the engine.
The device that spoke block messages (4a505a15) is withdrawn with its
test and its message types: Captain Bob ruled on 2026-10-07 that it, a
node's own drive, and nodes with no storage had left the OS as designed
(docs/v4.0.0/MESH.md 8.5).
Hera no longer sends POST to the nodes she births: POST is the kernel's,
once. Every node has its kernel on port 0; it serves a node's blocks and,
for Hera alone, her requests for nodes and capsules.
Bare metal: the node boots and is POSTed against POST's own block RAM,
and the kernel's chain -- fast RAM, the ramdrive, the virtio disk -- is
set up after POST and before the prompt, as on the v3 path. The disk is
read and not written: nothing in v4 yet gives the owner's word that it
may be formatted. A hosted program has the chain's fast RAM, as hosted
v3 has with no disk. Error 17 is Storage refused.
make -C v4 test and sanitize pass at both widths; hosted-check passes on
three ISAs; amd64, aarch64 and riscv64 boot, POST 538 of 538, with the
typed session: logs/20261007-081603, -081839, -082226. The hashes are
the same on all six.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One boot, v4/system/boot.c, for both products: it starts the nucleus image,
finds each capsule in the baked capsule directory, recomputes its hash,
checks its signature, gives its blocks to the node a line at a time, and
prints PARITY:V4_NUCLEUS, PARITY:V4_CAPSULE and PARITY:OK before the prompt.
A line the node does not accept ends the boot with the capsule, block and
line named. docs/v4.0.0/NUCLEUS.md.
- hosted Linux product for amd64, aarch64 and riscv64 (make -C v4 hosted);
make -C v4 hosted-check boots all three and requires identical output
- the kernel's v4 entry (STARFORTH_V4=1) calls the same boot
- capsules/v4/forth79.4th, block 6000: no definitions yet
- mkimage builds the nucleus only; no FORTH source is compiled at build time
- capsule_blocks.c: the Block-header parse, free of any VM, for every loader
Verified: make -C v4 test passes; hosted-check passes on the three ISAs with
the same hashes; the kernel compiles with STARFORTH_V4=1 on the three.
Not verified: no bare-metal boot of v4 has been run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
