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Agent OS
AOS-HW-015 Normative foundation

Debug, Power, Camera, and Reliability Laboratory

Debug, Power, Camera, and Reliability Laboratory: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

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Debug, Power, Camera, and Reliability Laboratory

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 Debug, Power, Camera, and Reliability Laboratory. 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. Represent devices and workloads with explicit power dependencies, residency costs, wake sources, quality levels, and thermal budgets.
  2. Background work requires declared urgency, deadline, network, energy, and user-value class.
  3. Quality may degrade predictably—frame rate, model size, camera pipeline, radio use—before safety limits are crossed.

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. Represent devices and workloads with explicit power dependencies, residency costs, wake sources, quality levels, and thermal budgets.
  • R02. Background work requires declared urgency, deadline, network, energy, and user-value class.
  • R03. Quality may degrade predictably—frame rate, model size, camera pipeline, radio use—before safety limits are crossed.
  • 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

  • Idle residency and wake-source tracing.
  • Battery-run and thermal chamber profiles.
  • Budget enforcement under adversarial background workloads.
  • 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-CAM-093 Establish a calibrated camera quality measurement laboratory P1 M5 Run the relevant document, schema, conformance, build, experiment, or hardware checks; independently review boundary compliance and acceptance criteria.

Risks and Open Questions

  • Undocumented PMIC and firmware sequencing can damage reliability.
  • Background agents can create persistent wakeups.
  • Thermal throttling can invalidate performance claims.
  • 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

Recommended

AOS-CAM-093 — Establish a calibrated camera quality measurement laboratory