Self's ruling of 2026-09-22 called it after seven Soul passes: a wall-clock
probe against cultmesh_quic_next_event's timeout can never tell the host's
argument from a clamp, floor, round, scale or later-poll fault that happens to
be the identity at the probe's own value, because there is always another
function that matches. Move the observation to where the rule is decided.
Add cultmesh_quic_debug_last_wait_ms / _reset_last_wait_ms, built exactly like
the existing hold seam: gated behind CULTMESH_QUIC_DEBUG_ASSERTS, absent from a
shipped build. CULTMESH_QUIC_DEBUG_RECORD_WAIT wraps the literal timeout_ms
handed to the condition wait as a pass-through, so what is recorded and what is
actually waited on are the same evaluation and cannot diverge except by
changing what the macro wraps.
Two scenarios:
- waitseam asserts the recorded wait equals the host's own argument, exactly,
over 0, 1, 15, 16, 39, 40, 999, 1000, 1001, 7300 and INT32_MAX (the header
states no narrower maximum), and over 40 polls on one runtime past the point
every prior scenario stopped asking. timeout_ms <= 0 never reaches the wait
at all, so its probe checks the honest converse — the seam stays untouched —
which is what catches a seam that records the raw argument on every call
instead of only the value it actually hands its wait.
- pollhammer runs one thread hammering every gate-touching entry point that
cannot itself queue an event, in a yield loop, against another thread's idle
poll, once on a clean runtime and once after a refused listener_open has
left runtime->error non-empty. The idle poll must still stay for its
timeout.
polltimeout, pollbusy and holdtimeout stay as generous-margin proof that the
recorded wait is really waited, not as the precision instrument they used to
have to be: the fastest-of-ten mechanism, the 15 ms probe's tight tolerance,
and the stated-limits table they rested on are gone, because waitseam now
kills every clamp, floor, round, scale, offset and later-poll mutant by
equality regardless of timing. The Windows priority raise these three
scenarios carried is gone with them: a flat 800 ms late tolerance already
covers the worst overshoot the old table recorded (127 ms at normal priority
under load), so raising the process above the load bought nothing the new
margin does not already have. holdtimeout's long probe moves to 1600 ms, above
the stated 1500 ms ceiling on the hold guard, with the hold kept armed to
3000 ms so a guard that parks a naturally-timed-out call anyway overshoots by
well more than the margin.
Verified locally on win32-x64: waitseam and pollhammer pass against the
unmutated bridge; a seam-loosening mutant (recording the raw argument outside
the wait's own branch) fails waitseam's 0 ms probe; an inline +25 ms offset on
the wait's argument fails waitseam by exact mismatch; the S5 hold-guard mutant
(timeout_ms > 1500) fails holdtimeout by 1.4 s overshoot; K1 (++wakes > 64), K2
(!error.empty()) and a no-predicate revert all fail pollhammer's idle poll
within tens of milliseconds. All were hand-reverted and diffed clean against
the working tree before this commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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