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Agent OS
AOS-HW-005 Normative foundation

Semi-Open Quality Hardware Track

Semi-Open Quality Hardware Track: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

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Semi-Open Quality Hardware Track

This specification treats hardware support as an evidence programme with explicit documentation rights, recovery paths, quality gates, and replacement strategies.

Table of Contents

Purpose and Scope

Area: Hardware Programme.

This specification treats hardware support as an evidence programme with explicit documentation rights, recovery paths, quality gates, and replacement strategies.

This document owns the semantics implied by Semi-Open Quality Hardware Track. It does not assert that every described subsystem already exists. It defines the target model, constraints, evidence needed to trust an implementation, and the boundary with adjacent documents.

Normative Position

  1. Define the boundary, owner, inputs, outputs, failure modes, observability, security authority, lifecycle, and compatibility policy.
  2. Keep implementation facts separate from desired outcomes and unverified assumptions.
  3. Require a reproducible evidence bundle before downstream components depend on the result.

Operating Model

The operating model is contract-first and evidence-driven. A component declares its authority, resources, lifecycle, error model, cancellation and timeout behavior, observability, version, and compatibility promise. Backends are replaceable only when the same conformance suite passes and no forbidden platform type leaks into portable layers.

Implementation proceeds through a reference model or mock, deterministic QEMU evidence where relevant, documentation-first physical hardware, and quality-hardware evidence. Pixel 9 adapters remain quarantined according to ADR-0004.

Requirements

  • R01. Define the boundary, owner, inputs, outputs, failure modes, observability, security authority, lifecycle, and compatibility policy.
  • R02. Keep implementation facts separate from desired outcomes and unverified assumptions.
  • R03. Require a reproducible evidence bundle before downstream components depend on the result.
  • R04. Specify normal, partial, denied, timeout, cancellation, restart, upgrade, and permanent-failure behavior.
  • R05. Expose structured diagnostics without leaking secrets or vendor-specific implementation details.
  • R06. Link material unknowns to a claim and, when testable, an experiment with an owner and gate.
  • R07. Update affected documentation and task data when evidence changes the model.

Failure and Degradation

Degradation must be explicit rather than accidental. The system reports capability absence, reduced quality, unavailable provider, stale data, or unsafe condition through typed states. It must not silently fall back to broader authority, unrestricted legacy execution, unverified firmware, lossy data migration, or irreversible agent action.

Recovery defines what state is retained, reconstructed, re-enrolled, compensated, or intentionally discarded. Unsupported hardware or providers are rejected at binding time where possible.

Evidence and Acceptance

  • Reviewed specification.
  • Linked tasks, claims, sources and experiments.
  • Conformance or acceptance evidence.
  • Evidence records target identity, hardware revision, firmware, source commit, toolchain, configuration, seed, timestamps, artifacts, expected result, actual result, and reviewer.
  • Acceptance requires the referenced tasks to meet their own criteria; prose completion is not implementation completion.

Implementation Obligations

Task Obligation Priority Gate/Milestone Verification
AOS-OPEN-070 Complete current Fairphone feasibility dossier P2 M5 EXP-024 and counsel/architecture/hardware review
AOS-OPEN-071 Complete Sony Open Devices feasibility dossier P2 M5 EXP-025 and review against public program terms/current device support
AOS-OPEN-095 Compare Fairphone and Sony as semi-open quality bridges P1 M1 Run the relevant document, schema, conformance, build, experiment, or hardware checks; independently review boundary compliance and acceptance criteria.

Risks and Open Questions

  • Undefined ownership and failure semantics create hidden coupling.
  • Unverified source claims can become architecture accidentally.
  • Open-question rule: an unanswered high-impact question becomes a claim/experiment record and cannot be hidden in meeting notes.
  • Stop rule: work stops or changes track when legal rights, recovery, debug access, safety, or the required evidence path is unavailable.

Related Documents

Planning Reference Anchors

Dossier Requirements

AOS-OPEN-070 — Complete current Fairphone feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-070 — Complete current Fairphone feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-071 — Complete Sony Open Devices feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-071 — Complete Sony Open Devices feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-095 — Compare Fairphone and Sony as semi-open quality bridges

Fairphone Track

AOS-OPEN-070 — Complete current Fairphone feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-070 — Complete current Fairphone feasibility dossier

Sony Track

AOS-OPEN-071 — Complete Sony Open Devices feasibility dossier; AOS-OPEN-071 — Complete Sony Open Devices feasibility dossier