Imported from sysprog21/elfuse (.claude/skills/elfuse-verify/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add sysprog21/elfuse --skill elfuse-verify. Copyright stays with the author.

Validating an elfuse change

Two independent gates: the runtime tests and the proofs. A change to attacker-facing bounds math needs both.

Independent in what they prove, not in what they consume. Run them one after the other, never concurrently. make verify re-invokes itself parallel and verify-mutants fans out too, while the runtime lanes are wall-clock sensitive, so overlapping them makes the machine fail tests that a serial run passes. Measured here: make check alongside the proof gate drove an 8-core host to a load average of 43.8 against a busy threshold of 4.8, and test-thread-churn timed out twice at 60 s and reported FAIL. The same binary on the same tree at load 4.0 finishes in 0.34 s, three runs out of three. Nothing was wrong with it. Neither mitigation saves you at that load, since test_host_is_busy only skips the throughput guardrail and the runner only re-runs once. A timing FAIL is worth nothing as evidence either way: it is not a regression you can act on, and a serial re-run is the only thing that tells you whether it was real.

The pure source scanners are the exception, and they are the cheap early signal while something long is in flight: check-lock-order, check-eintr-contract, check-atomics, check-proof-targets, check-stub-shadow and check-syscall-coverage read the tree, cost seconds, and fail long before a full lane would. Five of the six are on make check; check-stub-shadow is a prerequisite of every verify-* target instead, so it is not reached by make check alone. Running one directly with python3 scripts/<name>.py costs nothing and needs no arguments.

Five of the six write nothing. check-proof-targets is the one that does: it shells out to make print-verify-targets rather than reading mk/verify.mk, and a sub-make evaluates the build-flavor guard while it reads the makefiles. print-% goals are skipped by that guard for exactly this reason (mk/common.mk), so the scanner is safe to run beside a build; if you add a scanner that invokes make on some other goal, it is not.

Choosing what to run

docs/testing.md, section "Validation Strategy By Change Type", is a table from the area you touched to the minimum command set, and it is more specific than any habit. Consult it first. It is where you learn that Rosetta work wants make test-rosetta-all, that ptrace and debugger work want make test-gdbstub, and that filename-codec work wants the soak lane on top of make check.

The defaults below are what that table falls back to, not a substitute for it.

make check                       # unit tests, busybox, coverage gate, guardrail
bash tests/test-matrix.sh all    # the three modes

Runtime

Modes and what a failure in each means:

• elfuse-aarch64 - primary. Must stay green. A failure here is a regression.
• qemu-aarch64 - ground truth via Alpine aarch64-linux-musl under qemu-system-aarch64. It answers "what does real Linux do", which is why elfuse-debug reaches for it on any behavioral divergence. TIMEOUTs are emulation speed, not regressions.
• elfuse-x86_64 - the Rosetta path, with per-host-class baselines from detect_x86_64_host_class. Skips cleanly without the translator.

tests/fetch-fixtures.sh pulls Alpine packages, the linux-virt kernel, and Rosetta fixtures on first run. musl is Alpine's only libc, so glibc-dynamic lanes skip unless GUEST_GLIBC_* points at an external sysroot.

A fixture download that fails is not always a download failure. Some networks answer plain HTTP with a page of their own, which arrives as a valid 200 and only breaks at whatever tries to parse it: make check here failed at ar: Inappropriate file type or format on a busybox .deb that was 2997 bytes of HTML. The suite already knows this happens, which is what the wget lane's "no unintercepted http to example.com from this host" skip is about. So when a fixture step fails on a malformed archive, check what actually arrived before believing the archive is at fault, and prefer an HTTPS source: build/busybox now rewrites the mirror the Debian page lists to deb.debian.org, since the per-country mirrors it offers are plain HTTP and not all of them answer HTTPS at all.

Writing a test lane

The runner is already hardened, and every one of these exists because a test once passed without running anything. Do not work around them, and do not loosen one to get a build green.

• tests/lib/test-runner.sh::run and run_check wrap every invocation in timeout $TEST_TIMEOUT (gtimeout fallback on macOS).
• run_check and run_pipe fail on non-zero exit before pattern evaluation. A test that greps for a string in the output of a crashed binary is not a test.
• driver.sh::evaluate_result requires rc == expected_rc.
• ALLOW_MISSING_BINARIES defaults to 0. A missing fixture is a failure, not a skip.

Proofs

src/proved/ is header-only arithmetic carrying ACSL contracts: the bounds math of an attacker-facing parser or packer, split out of a .c and proved with -wp-rte.

Every src/proved/ header must have a matching make verify-<name> target, but the reverse does not hold. A few targets prove a .c file directly, each for a reason stated in the comment above it in mk/verify.mk; the general one is that the loops in question could only have been described as test-covered had they been split into a header.

make print-verify-targets is the current list. CI reads it to build its matrix, so do not hardcode the set anywhere else, including here.

make verify           # every proof target, parallel by default
make verify-<name>    # one target
make verify-mutants   # assert each proof rejects a known-broken source
make print-verify-targets
make check-contracts  # rebuild with -DELFUSE_CONTRACT_ASSERT, then make check

make verify re-invokes itself with -j$(VERIFY_JOBS) unless you brought your own -j. VERIFY_JOBS=1 is how you ask for serial on both GNU make 4.x and Apple's 3.81.

verify-mutants accepts MUTANT_TARGET=<name>, MUTANT_JOBS=<n>, MUTANT_SINCE=<rev> for a changed-only run, and MUTANT_ESCALATE=<seconds> (see the exhaustion section below).

Read past the "N mutations, N caught" line. It also prints the proved functions that have no mutation yet, and that list, not the caught count, is the honest measure of what the gate covers: all-caught alongside a handful of functions nobody has tried to break says the gate is green and that those proofs have never been asked whether they would reject a broken source. They are not failures, and they are not covered either.

Recompute that list before quoting it, and read what it counts. It counts distinct functions now; it used to count (target, function) pairs, so a function proved by two targets showed up twice and read as uncovered under its second target even though the first mutates it. That inflated the gap fourfold the last time it was checked - twelve listings, three functions.

A function can also sit in a _FCTS list with no ACSL contract at all, proved only for absence of runtime errors. Nothing there can reject a mutation, so adding one is wasted effort until the function has a contract: that is the fix, and it is usually two lines. Write the contract in the domain the code is in, too. futex_uaddr_is_aligned would not discharge as uaddr % 4 == 0 and does as (uaddr & 0x3) == 0, because bridging modulo and bitmask on a 64-bit value is what the prover times out on, not the property itself.

Adding a contract raises the obligation count, so raise VERIFY_<T>_MIN_GOALS with it. That floor is a tripwire against an emptied body or a dropped contract, which prove 0 of 0 and would otherwise pass; it is meant to sit at the target's baseline. Two contracts added here left it 15 and 2 obligations low, and nothing failed to say so, because a floor is only ever compared against from below.

Mutating a function that lives in an included header rather than in VERIFY_<T>_SRC works: the runner stages the mutant in its own directory and prepends it via MUTANT_INCDIR, where it shadows the real header. What a target may mutate is its source plus the headers in its VERIFY_<T>_SCAN.

The staged path must mirror the original's path under src/, and MUTANT_INCDIR must be the staging ROOT rather than the copy's parent, because the spelling in the #include is what the preprocessor searches for. Deriving it as the parent got src/utils.h right by luck and every nested header wrong: "proved/netlink.h" resolved to <parent>/proved/netlink.h, missed, fell through -Isrc to the real header, and the run proved unmutated code while reporting a mutation nobody caught.

The unmutated baseline cannot catch that, and it is worth knowing why, because the comment that claimed it could was wrong. The baseline stages a copy identical to the file it shadows, so whether the preprocessor opens the shadow or falls through, the program proved is the same and the run passes either way. What does catch it is a probe: stage a copy carrying #error, require the run to fail naming it, and read the LOG rather than make's stdout, since the recipe redirects Frama-C there and a non-zero exit alone is also what a broken override gives. It costs a parse, not a proof.

A mutation is caught by exhaustion here, not by refutation

Worth knowing before tightening the gate on principle. An open goal means the prover either reached a conclusion the mutant cannot satisfy ([Unknown], [Failed]) or ran out of budget ([Timeout], [Stepout]), and only the first is a refutation. In this tree the first never happens: across every mutation log the tag is [Timeout], and raising the budget eightfold to 240s on a host at 0.3 to 0.6 runnable threads per CPU left all four futexdeadline mutations exhausting exactly as they did at 30s. Alt-Ergo and Z3 do not refute these goals, they grind. So refusing to count exhaustion does not make the gate stricter, it makes "caught" unreachable and the gate permanently red.

What separates a broken contract from a merely hard one is the baseline, not the tag: the unmutated source proves every goal, and the mutant, narrowed to the mutated function, exhausts on that function's own goal. A goal that were only hard would exhaust in the baseline too, and a failing baseline is fatal rather than scored. The residual gap is a mutation that turns an easy true goal into a hard true one: it exhausts at the short budget and would discharge at a long one, and the tag alone cannot tell it from a rejection.

--escalate SECONDS closes that gap on demand. It re-runs every resource verdict at the larger budget and reports MISSED for any mutation that then proves, which is the honest verdict for one the proof does not reject. It is off by default because it costs the escalated budget on precisely the goal that already ran out of the short one, once per mutation, and every mutation in the table is a resource verdict. Run it when a contract changes or when the claim that these mutants are unprovable rather than slow is what is in question:

make verify-mutants MUTANT_TARGET=futexdeadline MUTANT_ESCALATE=240

Two things follow. Report the resource verdicts separately so the count never reads as "these proofs refute their mutants", and say which budget produced them. And do not diagnose them as load without measuring: a mutation run fans out and becomes its own load source, so a split computed during a parallel run will always disqualify itself. Serial (MUTANT_JOBS=1) on a quiet host is the only measurement that means anything, and here it returned the same answer.

The mutation runs pass -wp-cache none for a related reason. WP's cache defaults to update and stores a timeout as a stored verdict just like a conclusion, so a replayed timeout would be a catch obtained with no prover run at all. make verify keeps its cache, which is what makes a re-prove cheap; only the mutation gate, where a fresh verdict is the whole point, turns it off. That distinction is not academic: an elf_place_segment contract retried here came back Timeout from the cache on a quiet host, and only defeating the cache showed the real result.

scripts/proof-scope.py decides which targets a diff can reach, and .github/workflows/verify.yml builds its jobs from it, so a target the branch cannot affect gets no runner. It answers two questions: which targets to prove, and, with --mutation, which mutation sets to re-run, the second being narrower because a file that only schedules the run cannot change whether a target rejects a broken source. Every "cannot tell" answer widens back to the whole set, and a push to main always proves and mutates everything.

Three things follow when adding a target or a proof input. An input reached through -include or an -I the scan does not use is invisible to the closure and belongs in HARNESS_FILES (or under STUB_PREFIX). A file that only picks what runs goes in SCHEDULING_FILES, and the self-test refuses it if it also carries a prover budget or a make invocation. And proof-scope.py --self-test, run by .github/workflows/lint.yml, is what tells you the lists are still honest.

Adding to src/proved/

Nothing lands there without a proof target - scripts/check-proof-targets.py (a CI job in .github/workflows/lint.yml) fails otherwise. Callers include the header as proved/<name>.h.

The routine:

1. Extract the arithmetic into src/proved/<name>.h with ACSL contracts.
2. Add the VERIFY_<NAME>_SRC / VERIFY_<NAME>_MODEL / VERIFY_<NAME>_FCTS variables in mk/verify.mk so the rule template instantiates verify-<name>. typed is the default choice for a model; see below.
3. make verify-<name> until it discharges with -wp-rte.
4. make verify-mutants MUTANT_TARGET=<name> - a proof that cannot reject a broken source proves nothing.

Supporting gates, all of which run per target:

• scripts/check-acsl-coverage.py - catches a contract assumed because its function was left out of -wp-fct.
• scripts/check-char-signedness.py (make check-char-signedness) - compiles each proved function under -fsigned-char and -funsigned-char at -O0 and requires identical code. The data model used for proving differs from arm64 macOS on plain-char signedness; this is what keeps that sound.
• scripts/check-stub-constants.py (make check-stub-constants) - asserts every frama-c-stubs/ constant matches the macOS SDK. The analyzer never links, so a wrong constant cannot fail a build, it silently changes what the proof reasons about.

Choosing the next target

Parsability decides it before anything else does: a file Frama-C cannot parse cannot be proved, however good a candidate it looks. Test that first, because it costs one invocation and rules candidates out for free.

FC=$(command -v frama-c)
ARGS="-nostdinc -isystem $($FC -print-share-path)/libc -Iframa-c-stubs \
      -include prelude.h -include macos-libc.h -Isrc -Ibuild"
FILE=src/syscall/fs-stat.c
$FC -machdep gcc_x86_64 -cpp-extra-args="$ARGS" "$FILE"

CPP_DEFS is empty for every target but verify-gva, so leaving it out matches what most targets are proved under. A failure names its own cause: 'sys/attr.h' file not found is the real modeling gap and ends the matter, while Cannot resolve variable X is a missing declaration and is fixable under frama-c-stubs/.

parse_surface does the same probe over a whole file list and groups the failures by cause, which is the faster way to survey the tree. Give it the flags above as include_paths, isystem_paths, nostdinc and force_includes: a survey run without them measures a different program and its blocked set fills with files that parse perfectly well. Measured with the flags missing it reported 39 of 60 parsing against 46 of 60 true, and its largest blocker group was a phantom.

Whatever the probe, read which header stopped a file and whose include it was. A leaked include costs every file downstream of it and nothing to remove: deleting one unused sys/mount.h from runtime/procemu.h took three files straight into the parsing set.

Then rank what survives by whether it actually holds attacker-facing bounds math. The shape that has worked every time is a self-contained codec or walk over a guest-chosen blob: pure arithmetic, libc-only includes, an explicit output-buffer bound, and no syscalls. A file whose header comment already says it treats its input as untrusted and is free of project dependencies is telling you it was written to be proved.

Two things that look like candidates and are not. A file whose length arithmetic is all delegated to an already-proved header adds nothing but a second harness. And a translation table with no arithmetic, however attacker-reachable, has no obligations worth generating: -wp-rte on it proves that a switch is a switch.

Memory models, and what no model checks

Each target picks its own model via VERIFY_<NAME>_MODEL in mk/verify.mk, and the comment above it says why. Pick the model the code needs, not the model a neighbour target uses.

The general limit is worth understanding before trusting any of them: a non-typed model buys reasoning power by assuming something the proof does not check. caveat, used where typed cannot follow a byte-addressed buffer whose entry stride is attacker-chosen, assumes formal pointer parameters do not alias. The contracts state that with \separated, but the callers are not in -wp-fct, so nothing verifies they honor it, and a future caller passing the same address twice would invalidate the proof with no diagnostic.

That call-site gap is general, and it bites hardest for proved/gva.h: guest.c cannot be given to Frama-C at all, so nothing verifies its call sites honor the requires clauses. make check-contracts narrows it from the runtime side by turning the expressible ones into runtime asserts, and is deliberately separate from make check because those functions sit on the guest_read / guest_write hot path.

The frama-c MCP server, when it is available

make verify-<name> is a batch run: it either discharges or it does not, and a failure tells you little about which obligation is stuck. If the frama-c MCP server is connected, it drives the same Frama-C interactively, which turns contract writing into a loop instead of a guess. Start with self_check, because the optional pieces degrade independently, then reload the target's sources plus FRAMAC_STUB_DIR, run WP one function at a time, and use get_wp_goals and context to find which obligation is unproved rather than rewriting a contract on suspicion. Retrying the unproved goals distinguishes "not proved" from "not proved yet", so check that before rewriting a contract that only needed a longer timeout. create_sandbox is the honest way to try a strengthening without touching the real source.

Read the self_check result rather than the absence of an error: a degraded server still answers, and the answer looks like a normal response. frama_c.status: ok says only that the binary runs. The fields that decide whether the interactive path works at all are socket_spawn, and wp.available / eva.available under capabilities.

Do not read a failed socket_spawn as a missing ast_utils plugin without checking. Its probes are time-bounded, so on a loaded host they time out and report error or unknown for a plugin that is installed and works. Seen here at load 75 on 8 cores: socket_spawn reported "the probe process exited or never created one" and ast_utils came back unknown, while frama-c -load-module ast_utils_plugin -print-libc succeeded immediately and the plugin sat in Frama-C's plugin directory the whole time. opam_switch_hint timing out in the same report is the tell. Confirm with that one-line load before concluding anything, and re-run self_check on a quiet machine; only if the plugin is genuinely absent is the install cd ast-utils && dune install in the frama-c-mcp checkout.

reload_project does not take a raw preprocessor string. It takes structured flags, and an unknown key is accepted and dropped rather than refused, so a call carrying cpp_extra_args parses with none of them and then fails on a header that is on the real include path. Mirror FRAMAC_CPP_ARGS field by field instead; for this tree that is

include_paths:  ["frama-c-stubs", "src", "build"]
force_includes: ["prelude.h", "macos-libc.h"]
machdep:        "gcc_x86_64"

Those three lines are FRAMAC_INCLUDE_DIRS, FRAMAC_FORCE_INCLUDES and FRAMAC_DATA_MODEL from mk/verify.mk, and they are reproduced here only to show the shape; take the live values from make print-verify-profiles below rather than from this block, which nothing gates.

nostdinc and isystem_paths are fields, and they are not optional detail on this platform: without them the real macOS headers win over the modeled libc, and a file whose parse depends on that shadowing loads as a different program. Two measurements from when they could not be expressed, both worth knowing because they are what a load under the wrong headers looks like. src/syscall/sys.c parsed under the mk/verify.mk flags and failed without them, on a _Static_assert over struct rusage that only holds against the modeled header, which put it and six others in parse_surface's blocked set: 39 of 60 reported against 46 of 60 true.

The flags are not the only way the two can differ, and the other way cost me a wrong diagnosis. On src/syscall/net.c the server reported recv_at's pointer_alignment obligation unproved, surviving retry_unproved at double the budget, which is its own strongest test for a goal that is unprovable rather than slow. Under mk/verify.mk the same three functions discharge 6 of 6 and that obligation is never generated. I recorded that here as a header artifact; it was not. The cause was RTE: the kernel's generator and WP's own are different analyses, the kernel emits pointer_alignment assertions and WP's does not, and the server was starting Frama-C with -rte where the recipe passes -wp-rte. Fixed upstream, but the shape is worth keeping: a pointer_alignment goal the build never generates is the signature of the wrong RTE generator, not of a hard proof.

So the rule is not "distrust the server", it is "pass the flags". A profile from make print-verify-profiles carries both, and nostdinc must be stated for a profile to be proof evidence at all. When you load by hand instead, pass nostdinc and isystem_paths yourself, or you are measuring another program.

Two rules about what any of that proves:

• The MCP's default WP model is not what every target uses. A goal that discharges under defaults says nothing about whether make verify-<name> passes. Always mirror the target's own VERIFY_<NAME>_MODEL.

• A prover budget is wall-clock, so on a saturated machine a goal can reach it whatever its difficulty. Read wp_timeout_triage before believing a timeout verdict: it carries host_load_per_cpu in its evidence and drops to confidence: low above one runnable thread per CPU, and again when the reading is "unavailable", since an unread host is not a quiet one. Only a measured quiet host earns confidence: high.

• Re-running is not re-measuring, and this is the trap. WP's cache defaults to update, so it stores timeout verdicts too and replays them. Measured here: the same six functions, run under load (one-minute average 40 to 61 on 8 cores) and again at load 3.3, produced the identical proof_receipt sha256, with every timeout goal carrying from_cache: true. The second run proved nothing and looked exactly like the first.

  The response says so now. measurement reports replayed, unproved and unproved_replayed, and every_unproved_goal_was_replayed is the one to read: when it is true the run attempted none of its own failures, and wp_timeout_triage drops to confidence: low saying so. Pass cache: "None" to prove everything in the run. It is the same distinction proof_coverage draws between fresh_valid and cached_valid, and it costs a re-prove, so spend it when a verdict is about to become a decision.

• retry_unproved settles slow against unprovable, and nothing else. It re-runs the timed-out goals at double the budget and reports which flip, so an empty flipped means more time is not the fix. It does not check that the program under it is the one you meant: on src/syscall/net.c a goal survived it and was still an artifact of the wrong header environment. Rule out the load, the cache, and the flags before reading it as a property of the code.

• The connected server is whatever binary is installed, which can lag the source tree. A behavior described here that the running server does not show means the installed binary predates it, not that the description is wrong; self_check reports the server version.

• The MCP is an accelerator, never the gate. A change lands on make verify plus make verify-mutants, run from the Makefile, because that is what CI runs and what a contributor without the server can reproduce. Never report a proof as done on MCP evidence alone, and never add a workflow step, script, or CI job that depends on the server being connected.

It also answers the coverage question rather than just the green/red one, which is how you find a target that passes because it is proving less than you thought. proof_coverage is the tool for that:

# denominator: every defined function of the loaded project
proof_coverage {}

# denominator: the function set that target declares
proof_coverage {verify_profile: "<target>", detail: "full"}

It measures stored conclusions, not the last run, so it reports nothing until store_function_conclusion has filed a receipt from a run_wp on the real project. With nothing loaded and nothing stored it answers 0 of 0, incomplete, and an empty function list rather than an error, which is easy to skim as a clean report. Check the denominator before reading the percent.

Sandbox receipts are refused on purpose: a sandbox proves an extracted copy whose uncontracted callees are stubs. Merge the annotations back, re-run WP on the main project, and store that receipt.

Read a row's reason as the instruction, and treat an empty one as the only thing that counts. Three of them come up here more than the others:

• stale_source after a single edit. A receipt hashes the whole loaded file set, not the one file its function lives in, so touching any source reds the entire report. Expect it; it is not a signal about the function you edited.
• unverified_callee, propagated through the call chain. Fix what blocking_callees names first.
• proved_under_a_goal_filter, meaning the run passed prop and left the unselected obligations unattempted. That is the "proving less than you thought" case caught by name.

One limit on the number, on top of the two rules above. It reads WP only, so complete is a statement about proof obligations generated by the ACSL, RTE and WP configuration that produced those receipts. A requirement no contract states is not an uncovered row, it is absent from the denominator entirely, so coverage cannot tell you the property table is complete.

Calibrate the server before trusting a number from it

Run one already-green target through it and compare the obligation count with what the matching make verify-<name> reports. Use iov: three functions, one header, and a known answer of 40 of 40.

make verify-<name>                  # the answer, for name=iov
reload_project {verify_profiles: <make print-verify-profiles>,
                verify_profile: "iov"}
run_wp         {verify_profile: "iov", cache: "None"}

The counts must match exactly. Every wrong conclusion this file records came from skipping that check, and each was invisible without it:

• The server refused 20 of the 21 targets outright with invalid WP model 'typed', comparing the name case-sensitively where Frama-C does not care. A profile emitted faithfully from the recipe was rejected by the tool whose whole purpose is to run that recipe's proof.
• With that fixed it answered 42 obligations to the recipe's 40, both extras pointer_alignment on one function, because it started Frama-C with kernel -rte where the recipe passes -wp-rte. Those are different analyses and the larger one is not the target's.
• caveat, which one target is proved under, is accepted by Frama-C and named nowhere in -wp-h, so a list built from that help text called it invalid.

None of those announced themselves. Each produced a confident, well-formatted answer about a program the build system does not prove, and retry_unproved confirmed one of them. Two numbers side by side is the cheapest thing that catches the whole class, and it costs one target.

Making the MCP prove what the Makefile proves

make print-verify-profiles emits the verify_profiles JSON for all of mk/verify.mk, one entry per target, carrying the sources, functions, model, machdep, include paths, defines, provers, timeout and a reproduce command. It comes from the same variables the verify-<name> recipe consumes, so a profile and a Makefile run cannot disagree about what a target proves. Emit it, never hand-write it: a hand-written function set is the drift the whole mechanism exists to prevent.

That property is only as good as the sharing. The two lists the profile and the recipe both need, include directories and force-includes, live in FRAMAC_INCLUDE_DIRS and FRAMAC_FORCE_INCLUDES; FRAMAC_CPP_ARGS turns them into -I and -include flags with patsubst, and the emitter passes them through as the bare directories and headers the schema wants. Spelling either list twice is the bug this arrangement exists to prevent, and it is not hypothetical: they were duplicated at first, under a comment claiming they could not drift. If you add an include path, add it there and check both sides move:

make print-verify-profiles FRAMAC_INCLUDE_DIRS="... extra" | grep extra
make -n verify-align       FRAMAC_INCLUDE_DIRS="... extra" | grep -- -Iextra

The emitter refuses rather than emitting a profile that cannot be used: no sources, no functions, an empty or blank model, no provers, a non-positive timeout, a CPP_DEFS token that is not a -D, or no targets at all. Each names the make variable to look at. That matters because the server's own refusal comes much later and names none of them: a profile missing one required field is accepted for loading and then rejected by every run_wp and every store_function_conclusion that names it, which reads as a broken target rather than as an empty variable on the command line that produced it.

That closes the loop between the two tools:

make print-verify-profiles                      # from the build system
reload_project {verify_profiles: <that JSON>, verify_profile: "<target>"}
run_wp         {verify_profile: "<target>"}
store_function_conclusion {function, status: "verified",
                           proof_receipt_sha256, verify_profile: "<target>"}
proof_coverage {verify_profile: "<target>", detail: "full"}

The JSON goes in as the object or as its text: the verify_profiles parameter is untyped, so a client that stringifies it is not making a mistake, and the server decodes either. Naming the profile is what makes each step mean the target rather than the server's defaults. A run that deviated from the profile is refused as that target's evidence rather than quietly accepted, and a conclusion stored without one records what was proved but not what it settles.

Three things to know when feeding it in. The profile carries nostdinc and isystem_paths alongside the include paths, all four from the same mk/verify.mk variables the recipe uses, so the load the server makes is the one the recipe makes. The model strings are the Makefile's own spelling (typed, caveat, Bytes), which is the point: normalizing them here would make the profile prove something the recipe does not. And every profile carries rte: true, because every verify-<name> recipe passes -wp-rte: that flag decides which obligations exist at all, so a load without it gives a strictly smaller set. The server treats it as part of the load identity, so a non-RTE load is refused as that target's evidence rather than quietly accepted, and a profile that omits it can load sources but cannot be proof evidence.

rte: true means WP's generator specifically, not Frama-C's kernel one. They are different analyses over the same code and the kernel's is larger: it emits pointer_alignment assertions WP's does not. The server used to start Frama-C with kernel -rte here, which is how a profiled iov run answered 42 obligations to the recipe's 40 with both extras unproved. Worth knowing because the field cannot express the difference, so the only way to see it is the calibration above.

frama-c-stubs/

Declarations the analyzer needs that the compiler or macOS supplies: Hypervisor/Hypervisor.h and macos-libc.h for Darwin constants the modeled libc omits, plus prelude.h, which declares nothing of its own and instead force-includes the two headers Frama-C ships but never reaches on its own: its gcc-builtins model, and its stdatomic.h for the _Atomic qualifier its front end cannot parse and for the C11 atomics vocabulary the tree calls.

It sits outside src/ on purpose so a real compile, which resolves through -Isrc, cannot reach it. Only FRAMAC_STUB_DIR in mk/verify.mk does. It is tracked in git because every proof target needs it to parse.

A missing declaration fails with "Cannot resolve variable" - that is how the next one gets found. Only a minority of src/'s .c files parse today; the rest stop on macOS headers Frama-C's libc genuinely does not model (sys/mount.h, sys/event.h, sys/sysctl.h, sys/xattr.h, sys/attr.h, sys/spawn.h). That is a real modeling gap. Do not paper over it with a fake stub, and do not quote a parse count without recomputing it.

Other checks

These are not part of make check and each answers a different question:

make lint                  # clang-tidy
make check-format          # formatting, and regenerates the dispatch header
make check-asan            # use-after-free, overflow, on the host side
make check-ubsan           # undefined behavior
make check-tsan            # data races, worth it for anything multi-vCPU
make infer-uninit          # uninitialized reads

What done means

Green is a claim about named commands, so report it as one: which lanes ran, what each said, and which ones did not run. The failure modes to avoid, all of which have shipped before:

• A lane that could not run is named along with the risk that leaves. It is never rounded up into the passing set.
• The exit status a gate reports is the one to quote, and it is not always the one you are shown. A backgrounded make check > log 2>&1; echo $? reports the status of the whole command line, so a trailing echo makes a failing make look like a success: this happened three times in one session, twice hiding a real non-zero make. Read the status from inside the command, or read the log for make: *** [target] Error N and the suite's own Results: line. A single green summary line proves nothing on its own either, since make stops at the first failing step and the suites after it never print.
• A count, a latency, or a coverage figure is recomputed before it is quoted, including from this file and from CLAUDE.md, whose counts drift because nothing gates them. Measured in one session: 21 verify targets against its 20, 32 file-scope locks against its 31, 17 files under src/proved/ against the 15 it lists. The gates print the live number, so take it from make print-verify-targets and from what check-lock-order and check-proof-targets report. A number carried forward from a document reads as measured and is not.
• The PROVED n of n line is not in build/verify-<name>.log, which carries Frama-C's own [wp] Proved goals: N / N instead. It is check-wp-result.py's console output, colorized unconditionally, with the escape sitting between PROVED and the count. So a total summed from a make verify transcript with a naive grep -oE 'PROVED +[0-9]+ of [0-9]+' silently matches nothing and reports an empty sum rather than failing. Strip the escapes first (sed 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g'), or total the logs on Proved goals instead.
• A proof is done when make verify and make verify-mutants say so from the Makefile. MCP goals discharging is progress, not a verdict.
• A failure blamed on the environment earns one reproduction attempt under the condition blamed for it before it is written off. "Transient" and "the host was busy" are the two that hide real defects here, because a test harness racing its own pipeline and a probe that measures the wrong thing both fail only under load or only on some networks. Reproduce it, or say it went unexplained; do not report it as understood. Raising the reproduction rate on a failure that will not repeat on demand is elfuse-debug, under "When it only fails sometimes".

The throughput guardrail is the exception to that bullet: it is the one lane where load genuinely decides the result. It runs near the end of make check, so it measures on a machine make check has just loaded, and an UNMEASURED verdict there says nothing about the change. Re-run make test-bench-guardrail alone on an idle host and report what it says. UNMEASURED exits non-zero exactly as a threshold violation does.

Establish the baseline before a multi-command session rather than after: this tree is not green everywhere, and without the before-picture there is no way to separate breakage you caused from breakage you inherited.

Authoritative sources

This skill is a working summary. These are tracked and survive a fresh clone, so prefer them when the two disagree:

• docs/testing.md, section "Validation Strategy By Change Type" - the change area to command mapping.
• mk/verify.mk - the per-target _SRC / _MODEL / _FCTS variables and the comment above each explaining its model choice.
• tests/test-bench-guardrail.sh - the comment above the unmeasured check, for why UNMEASURED and FAIL both exit non-zero.