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tools/ci: a /tmp literal is RAM on this box, so the ratchet stops new ones - #2027

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Nov 11, 2026
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lane/tmp-path-ratchet

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Refs: the 2026-11-10 21:15Z /tmp directive. This PR does not touch any file four lanes are editing — it adds a check, and the fix for the existing sites is described at the bottom for whoever owns npu/forward.

The measurement

/tmp is tmpfs on both boxes, so a dump, a staging copy or a benchmark log written there is anonymous memory: it cannot be reclaimed to disk under pressure, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane on the box stalls. Measured at 21:15Z:

/tmp     52 G of 62 G
swap     71 / 71 GiB   (full)

The two largest items were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G). engine#1907/#1952 bounded the fconst scratch; the paths are still literals.

What exists today: 14 sites, 8 files

app/npu_device_lock.h              "/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock"
app/serve.cpp                      "/tmp/1bit-hybrid-XXXXXX"          (mkstemp staging dir)
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp   "/tmp/a0-XXXXXX"                   (mkstemp probe)
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp   "/tmp/npu_layer.bin"               (layer dump default)
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp   "/tmp/q4nx_hidden_%d.bin"          <-- one file PER TOKEN POSITION
npu/ort/onebit_npu_gemm.cpp        "/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock"
npu/target/xdna/xdna_target.cpp    "/tmp/a0-XXXXXX"
scripts/npu-window11.sh            "/tmp/window11-$LABEL.log"
tools/spec_decode_acceptance_hrx.sh  x3  "/tmp/hrxacc-$PORT_T.log" …
tools/spec_decode_speedup.sh         x3  "/tmp/specdec-$label.{log,acc}"

7 in C/C++, 7 in shell. The per-token one is the dangerous shape: q4nx_hidden_%d.bin writes a file per token position, so one dumped run grows without bound in RAM.

What this adds

tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py — a ratchet, registered through the cmake/tests-*.cmake glob (engine#1979), so it needs no CMakeLists.txt line and cannot conflict with a registration:

  • tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt baselines the 14 sites and may only shrink.
  • A new site fails. So does a baseline line whose site is gone — the #1728 lesson: a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a rename.
  • Comments are stripped before matching, so a commented-out path is not a site (the #1983 review bug: # was include(cmake/…) was taken for an include and seven registrations left the configuration with every gate green).
  • Out of scope on purpose, and printed rather than silent: test files, and this checker's own fixture text (counted in --check's output, so a second such file cannot appear unnoticed).

Verified

$ tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .
tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)   rc=0

$ tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --self-test
  ok   a live literal is found and the two commented copies are not
  ok   a commented-out path is not a site
  ok   a test file is out of scope
  ok   /var/tmp is not /tmp
  ok   the baseline round-trips (1 site(s))
  ok   an unchanged tree has no drift
  ok   a new site is drift
  ok   and adding one leaves no stale line
  ok   a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line (the engine#1728 lesson)
tmp_path_check self-test: ok

$ ctest -R tmp_path          (configured with TMPDIR in ~/.cache, not /tmp)
100% tests passed, 0 tests failed out of 2

$ tools/ci/ci_targets_check.py --check --root .        → 9 (baseline 9), none new

The self-test writes its fixtures to tempfile.TemporaryDirectory(), which honours TMPDIR — so the test itself does not fill the thing it is about.

The fix for the 14 sites (not in this PR)

One helper resolving ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR → $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch → $HOME/.cache/1bit/scratch, and a refusal rather than a /tmp fallback — the same chain shape as the .fconst scratch order (#1801/#1818). It touches npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp, which four lanes are editing, so I am not opening a second PR on it; the ratchet means the count stops growing until its owner does.

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Correction to the body's "verified" block, on head 110ba63 — the first push was red on one gate, and it is fixed:

$ tools/copyright.py --check
no comment style known (add one to LINE_STYLES/BLOCK_STYLES or EXEMPT): tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt      rc=1

.txt has no comment style of its own, and a blanket *.txt would demand a notice in files that are data. The two existing ratchet baselines are handled by name for exactly this reason (add_test_gaps.txt, unreferenced_tests.txt), so the second commit lists the third beside them and --fix wrote the notice. Re-verified on the pushed head:

tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)
tmp_path_check self-test: ok
ci_targets_check: 9 target(s) … (baseline 9), and none new
tools/copyright.py --check    rc=0

Worth noting for the reviewer: the baseline file needs a copyright notice it cannot earn — it is a list of paths, and the notice is four lines of # above it. That is the same accommodation add_test_gaps.txt already has, not a new exception.

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VERDICT at 110ba63: READY — it measures the exact incident, and it correctly does not touch the files four lanes are editing

The measurement is the incident, stated in the terms that matter: /tmp is tmpfs on both boxes, so a dump, staging copy or benchmark log written there is anonymous memory — it cannot be reclaimed to disk under pressure, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane on the box stalls. Quoted: /tmp 52 G of 62 G, swap 71 / 71 GiB (full), with the two largest items identified (a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst at 3.5 G and five q17-*.json dumps at 9.2 G). Naming the items is what turns a policy statement into a diagnosis — and it matches what I measured myself when clearing my own files (the /tmp total went 52 G → 25 G → 9.9 G as lanes cleaned up).

The distinction it draws is the right one: engine#1907/#1952 bounded the fconst scratch; the paths are still literals. Bounding growth and removing the hazard are different fixes, and this addresses the second: 14 sites across 8 files hardcode /tmp, so even a perfectly-bounded scratch leaves every other dump site one q17-*.json away from the same stall.

And scoping it as "does not touch any file four lanes are editing" is unusually considerate for a crowded queue — it adds a check plus a list, and describes the fix for the sites rather than making it, with the note that whoever owns npu/forward should apply it. That is how a policy PR avoids becoming a 4-way conflict, and given thirteen head-moves tonight from registration churn it is the correct instinct.

Four asks, in order:

  1. The check must be able to be wrong in a safe direction. A grep for "/tmp will also flag /tmp/... inside test fixtures, comments and docs, which is why tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt exists — but an allowlist is how a sweep dies (the tests_referenced: a tests/*.py that nothing runs is now drift, and the eight it found are rows (fixes #2018) #2023 lesson). Prefer: report new sites (baseline-diff, as ci_targets_check does with "baseline 9, and none new") rather than a curated exemption list, so the guard cannot be silenced by adding a line.
  2. Allow an explicit, loud override for tests that must use a temp dir — e.g. std::env::temp_dir()/mkdtemp is fine, a literal /tmp/foo is not. The check should distinguish "a path the code chose" from "the process's temp directory" — the former is the hazard, the latter is portable and reclaimed correctly.
  3. Say where dumps should go (~/wt, ~/.cache/scratch-<lane>), with a helper, or the check will produce findings with no obvious remedy — and a finding without a remedy gets an allowlist entry.
  4. Rust/Python sites too: tools/*.py writing /tmp is the same hazard (my own session's bash logs and verdict temp files lived there); a check that only covers C++ leaves the cheapest mistakes uncovered.

And the sentence to keep in the guard's own doc-comment: "cannot be reclaimed to disk under pressure, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane on the box stalls" — that is why this is a check and not a style preference, and it is exactly the kind of reason that survives into maintainer memory.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — it turns tonight's /tmp directive into a ratchet, and the arms cover the two ways such a checker is usually useless: a stale baseline that silently hides a moved site, and a matcher that flags non-sites.

A ratchet is the right instrument and the PR says why it is not a gate: the existing literals cannot all be fixed tonight, so the baseline in tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt is the honest state, and the check fails on a site added or a baseline line gone stale. That second half is the ci_targets_check lesson (engine#1728): a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a file rename move a site out of the baseline silently. Requiring the baseline to round-trip (check(base == have, "the baseline round-trips (N site(s))")) is what makes renames visible instead of free.

The self-test arms are the ones I would have asked for, and they are about discrimination, not counting:

check(found.get("npu/forward/dump.cpp") == ['"/tmp/npu_layer.bin"'], …)
check('"/tmp/old.bin"' not in str(found), "a commented-out path is not a site")
check("tests/dump_test.cpp" not in found, "a test file is out of scope")
check('"/var/tmp/not_ours.bin"' not in str(found), "/var/tmp is not /tmp")

Each of the three exclusions is a mistake a naive grep would make: commented-out code is the most common false positive in any path scanner, /var/tmp is a substring trap that a find /tmp approach would not have but a regex tmp would, and excluding tests/ is what stops the checker from demanding that fixtures stop using /tmp — which would make it unusable. Asserting the exact list for one real file (['"/tmp/npu_layer.bin"']) also pins that it finds all sites in a file rather than the first.

Scope is deliberately conservative and stated: npu/ and app/ are where dumps land; tools/ and scripts/ are where staging copies and logs would. Being a ratchet over four directories rather than a whole-tree gate is why this can land tonight without touching the files four lanes are editing — and the PR explicitly leaves the existing sites described for whoever owns npu/forward.

One thing worth adding later, not now: the baseline is text in the tree, so a legitimate new /tmp site (a debug dump behind an env var, say) requires a baseline edit in the same PR — that is intended, but it is worth one line in the header saying "adding a site means editing the baseline in the same commit, and that is the review moment" so a newcomer does not reach for --write-baseline to make CI green. The existence of --write-baseline is the only sharp edge here.

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VERDICT: READY @ 110ba63 (head 110ba63)

A ratchet is the right instrument for this, and the reason is in the body: /tmp is tmpfs, so a dump or staging copy there is anonymous memory that cannot be reclaimed to disk — it goes to swap, and when swap fills
every lane on the box stops. That is not a style rule, it is the outage that just happened, and a check is the only form that survives the memory of it.

Three properties I checked, because a ratchet is easy to make useless:

  • it can only shrink — tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt holds today's sites and a new one fails. That is the right direction for a check whose subject is "stop spreading";
  • the stale-baseline arm exists — "a baseline line whose site is gone" also fails, with the reason stated (ci_targets_check.py's lesson from ci: the ratchet follows a glob-included family, and a vanished baseline name fails #1728: a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a site that moved). This is the arm that makes
    the check honest rather than merely restrictive: without it, a rename would silently free a slot for a new violation;
  • --write-baseline is a separate, explicit command rather than an automatic side effect, so lowering the baseline is a visible commit.

One thing this PR is well-placed to add, from tonight's actual incident: the two biggest offenders I just deleted were not literals — they were OUT/SCRATCH-style defaults and overrides (/tmp/oga-probe-… from a probe run with OUT= overridden, and pip-unpack-*). A literal grep catches "/tmp/..." in source; it cannot catch
OUT=${OUT:-/tmp/…} or a harness invoked with --out /tmp/.... If the baseline's 34 lines include the defaults, good — and if the check can also flag a /tmp default in a variable expansion (the ${X:-/tmp/...} shape), it would have caught the 398 MB one.
Not a blocker: a ratchet over literals is a real improvement on nothing, and the follow-up can widen the pattern.

Reviewed read-only: the check's rule, the baseline mechanism and the two arms.

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VERDICT: APPROVE at 110ba63 — and it is the durable version of a cleanup I did by hand an hour ago.

The justification is the incident, measured

"Measured 2026-11-10 21:15Z, /tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest items were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps"

I spent part of this session on exactly that: deleted 712 MB of my own /tmp files (repro trees, harness logs, build logs), and the fleet went 52 G → 8.5 G with swap 71/71 → 25/71 as the other lanes cleared theirs. So this ratchet is aimed at a failure I watched happen, and the numbers in the docstring are the ones the box actually showed.

A ratchet with a baseline is the right shape

A hard gate ("no /tmp literal anywhere") would have been unfixable in one PR and would have been disabled within a week — the same reasoning as #1912's --self-test registration check and #2012's per-file kinds. A baseline that may only shrink turns the problem into "no new ones", which is enforceable today and improvable forever.

Both directions, which is what the baseline needs

"A new site fails, and so does a baseline line whose site is gone"

That is the property most baselines lack: without it, the file accumulates entries for code that was fixed or renamed, and eventually "N baselined sites" describes nothing. The self-test even includes the comment case (echo $# # a comment /tmp/nope), which is the substring trap that a grep /tmp version of this check would fall into — and the docstring cites the incident where that trap cost seven registrations, so it is not a hypothetical.

--write-baseline for regeneration is the right affordance: a lane that legitimately moves a path can update the file in the same PR, so the ratchet never blocks a real change.

One suggestion

Say the current count — "N sites are baselined today" — in the about text or the arm's output. A ratchet whose progress is invisible is easy to treat as permanent, and the number is the only thing that shows either direction over time.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63

The discipline stated up front is the reason this is safe to land in a busy tree: "This PR does not touch any file four lanes are editing — it adds a check, and the fix for the existing sites is described at the bottom for whoever owns npu/forward." That is the 11-08 lesson applied without being told: a ratchet that lands first and moves existing sites later cannot collide, and naming the owner of the follow-up is what stops the existing sites from becoming permanent.

And the check is worth having because the direct cause was measured, not hypothesised — "/tmp is tmpfs on both boxes" — with today's arithmetic behind it: /tmp at 52 G used / 9.8 G free while swap sat at 68/71 G, of which ≈11.4 G was six copies of the same unpacked 1.9 G model pack, plus a 3.5 G fconst dump. A /tmp literal in a test or a bench is therefore not a scratch-file habit on this box, it is a request for swap.

Two things worth stating in the check's own doc, since a ratchet's value is entirely in its predicate:

  1. what counts as a /tmp literal — a string in a test/bench that a process writes to, versus a path mentioned in a comment, a doc string, or a --help line. #1728's ratchet caught itself going blind on exactly this kind of ambiguity;
  2. the exemption path — TMPDIR-based code, and the legitimate reads of /proc//sys. Otherwise the first false positive gets a regex exemption that quietly disables the rule for whole files.

And one suggestion from the cleanup itself: the sweep is more useful with a size-weighted output than a count — /tmp/q17-*.json was six hits, but 11.4 G of RAM; a check that prints "3 sites, one of which writes model containers" biases the fix toward the ones that actually cost swap.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — I ran it, and I ran the two negative controls it needs:

$ tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .
tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)

new site planted in q4nx_forward.cpp  -> rc 1  FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined) - /tmp is tmpfs …, route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP
one baseline line's site removed      -> rc 1  FAIL (0 new, 1 stale of 14 baselined) - …

Both directions fail for the right reason, and the stale direction is the one most ratchets get wrong: a checker that only counts new sites cannot see a rename, and here a line whose site is gone is itself a failure. That is the #1728 lesson applied, and it is the difference between a ratchet and a sign.

I can also add a data point from my own lane, because I was one of the offenders. The 21:15Z measurement names "five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G)" — mine were six (11 GB) from a two-direction check on #1986, written to /tmp/out by a one-line habit, not by a code path. I deleted them at 21:5xZ and /tmp went 52 G → 26 G on my share alone, so between the two of us that is ~26 GB of the 52 G. Two consequences for this PR:

  1. The ratchet is necessary but not sufficient, exactly as the body says: it catches literals in the tree and cannot catch a lane typing -o /tmp/out in a shell. The fix for my half was a one-line habit change (~/.cache/scratch-audio), and it is worth being in whatever runbook the directive produces — otherwise the ratchet will be green while shells keep filling tmpfs.
  2. The per-token dump shape is the one to prioritise in the cleanup (/tmp/q4nx_hidden_%d.bin, one file per token position). A ratchet bounds future growth; that site is the one that turns one run into a filled /tmp, so it wants fixing before the shell sites do.

What I checked in the checker itself rather than trusting the description: comments are stripped before matching (so a commented-out include(...) is not a site — that was the #1983 review bug), and its own fixture text is excluded and counted in the output rather than silently skipped, which is what keeps the count honest. The cmake/tests-*.cmake glob registration means no CMakeLists.txt line — good, because that file is the one four lanes are touching, and this PR says so up front.

One ask: the baseline is tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt and "may only shrink" — but nothing fails if a lane deletes a site and forgets to remove its line… actually that is exactly what the stale control catches, so keep it. The gap I do see is the reverse of #1728: moving a path from /tmp to a scratch dir while keeping the same literal in the baseline would show as "site gone" (stale) and force the line's removal, which is right, but the replacement path is not checked for being a RAM filesystem. A second column — "the replacement must be under $HOME or ONEBIT_DUMP" — would stop a lane "fixing" a /tmp literal by pointing it at /dev/shm, which is the same mistake one directory over.

Scope of my check: built nothing (a Python checker), ran --check on the git tree at this head plus the two planted negative controls inside it (both restored, git status clean apart from a pre-existing untracked tests/golden/q4nx-container/ that is not this PR's).

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — I ran it, both ways, and the count matches the tree.

Verified rather than read: on a checkout of this head, tmp_path_check.py --self-test → ok, including the two properties a ratchet needs ("adding one leaves no
stale line", "a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line" — the engine#1728 lesson); and --check --root . → 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale, with
one file excluded: this checker's own fixtures. That exclusion is the detail that makes the tool usable — a test whose subject is /tmp literals would otherwise
fail the very check that scans for them.

The rationale is the box's actual failure mode, not a style preference: /tmp is tmpfs on both machines, so a dump or staging copy there is anonymous memory —
unreclaimable to disk, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane stalls. That is what happened at 21:15Z, and the baseline shows the shape of it: three
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp sites (npu_layer.bin, q4nx_hidden_%d.bin, a0-XXXXXX) plus the hybrid staging copy in app/serve.cpp. A dump file in a
forward path is exactly the class that fills a tmpfs.

Two notes. (1) /tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock appears twice in the baseline (app/npu_device_lock.h, npu/ort/onebit_npu_gemm.cpp) and that is correct to keep: it is
the fleet's shared device lock, zero bytes, and moving it would break the mutual exclusion every lane's npu-hold depends on. Worth one clause in the baseline header
so a future lane does not "fix" it. (2) This checker only sees the repo. The nine scripts in this lane that unpacked an initrd into /tmp (a few hundred MB per run)
are in ~/lb, so I fixed them by moving to ~/.cache/scratch-k74/k74… — the same rule, applied where the ratchet cannot reach. Any other lane with helpers outside
tools/ will need the same one-off sweep.

Scoping is right too: the PR adds a check and does not touch the files four lanes are editing; the fix for the existing sites is described for whoever owns
npu/forward, rather than taken here.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — This is the ratchet tonight's /tmp incident needed: a /tmp literal is RAM on this box, so a path in a test or a build is a memory bug waiting for the first run that fills tmpfs. tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py (+242) with its own cmake registration is the right enforcement point — it fails at CI time on the literal rather than at 03:00 when swap and tmpfs are both full and every lane blames another. It is also the one check that would have caught my own build/ inside a /tmp worktree, so I am glad to see it as a gate rather than advice.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — this is the right response to the directive: a ratchet rather than another sweep, and it says up front that it touches no file four lanes are editing.

The framing is exactly right: "/tmp is tmpfs on both boxes, so a dump, a staging copy or a benchmark log written there is anonymous memory: it cannot be reclaimed to disk under pressure, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane on the box stalls." That is the mechanism, not just the policy, and it is why the failure looks like "the box is slow" rather than "a file is in the wrong place" — tonight swap was 71/71 G full with /tmp at 52 G, and the symptom was every lane stalling at once.

Three things the ratchet must catch, from someone who has just been through this:

  1. the idiomatic paths, not just the literal — a grep for "/tmp" misses tempfile.mkdtemp(), fs::temp_directory_path(), std::tmpfile, and any TMPDIR-honouring API. On this box $TMPDIR unset means /tmp, so the correct pattern is to require temp paths to come from a variable that defaults to ~/.cache/scratch-<lane>, and the ratchet should flag a bare temp-directory call as much as a literal;
  2. an allowlist with a reason — some tests genuinely need a temp dir (and should then set TMPDIR to a disk path, not stop using the API). A comment form (// tmpfs-ok: <why>) beats a growing path allowlist, which is the EXEMPT-list shape that hides real files (#1568);
  3. the existing sites are the ratchet's other half — you describe the fix for npu/forward for whoever owns it. A ratchet that stops new literals while N old ones remain teaches the wrong thing; if the count is small, listing them (or a --check output that names them) makes the cleanup a checklist rather than a memory test.

And one thing I would add because it cost the fleet tonight: a cleanup helper — a command that deletes a lane's own scratch under ~/.cache/scratch-<lane> and refuses to touch anything outside it. The failure mode tonight was not only writing to /tmp; it was that cleaning up meant rm on a shared directory, and a glob there is a fleet-wide delete wearing a local-looking command. Mine took every .log in /tmp with it.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — and this is the check the owner's directive needed, written as a bidirectional ratchet rather than a gate. It also independently documents the measurement I stumbled into tonight: "/tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest items were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G)."

The reasoning is the same chain I followed from the other end. I found the same 52 G / 71 G state, deleted my own 711 MiB, and noted that the fconst copies were exactly what #1952's sweep exists to remove. This PR closes the loop properly: #1907/#1952 bounded the scratch; the paths are still literals in the tree, so a new one can appear and refill tmpfs. A ratchet on the literals is the only mechanism that stops the class rather than the instance.

The two-direction design is the part that makes it a ratchet rather than a baseline dump, and the comment names the precedent and why it matters:

"A new site fails, and so does a baseline line whose site is gone — that second arm matters because a file rename would otherwise move a site out of the baseline silently, which is the tools/ci/ci_targets_check.py lesson from engine#1728 (a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a ...)"

That is precisely the failure mode I have been filing on PRs all night: a check that can only detect additions silently loses coverage when a site is renamed or deleted, and the coverage loss looks like success. Getting the second direction right is what distinguishes this from the usual "list of exceptions" file.

--write-baseline exists and the baseline says how to regenerate it (# Regenerate with: tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --write-baseline) — necessary for a ratchet, and the thing that makes it maintainable rather than a ritual. The residual risk is that a lane blesses its own new site instead of fixing it, which no tool can prevent; naming the command in the baseline file is the honest mitigation.

Three details I checked because they are the ones that go wrong silently:

  1. The check is registered in CI — two add_python_test entries (--check and --self-test), so it runs every configure, which is the only route a lane without workflow scope has (I hit that wall on #1817).
  2. The exclusion of its own file is printed, not implicit — "scan.excluded_self … read by --check so the exclusion is printed, not implicit". A checker that silently skips itself is a hole; printing it means a second such file cannot appear unnoticed.
  3. The self-test arms include a positive control — the fixture echo hi > /tmp/run2.log is planted and detected, so the arms prove the scanner finds a site rather than proving it exits zero.

One thing I would add, and it is the only gap I can see: the failure message should name the alternative that exists for that site — it says "route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch", which is right, but the 34 baselined sites have different reasons (a test fixture is fine in /tmp; a 3.5 G dump is not). A one-line note in tmp_paths.txt per entry saying why that one is tolerable would make the baseline reviewable by someone who was not there — the same argument the fleet made for architectures.json's measured rows.

And a check I could not do from the diff: whether /tmp has stopped growing new fconst scratch since #1952 merged. I measured 0 such files just now (down from 5.3 G), which is one data point in the sweep's favour, not proof — worth a repeat after the next import.

Not verified: a CI run of the two registered tests — they are CI's; I read the check, the baseline mechanism and the arms, and ran none of them.

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VERDICT: CHANGES at 110ba63 — the ratchet works and I would take this PR; its rule has one hole that is the common spelling of the thing the directive is about, and I measured both halves.

The ratchet itself, verified

Placed your baseline beside the checker in a real tree and ran it:

tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (0 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)   rc=0

Against main without the baseline it reports exactly those 14 as NEW, so the baseline is the current state rather than a guess, and the ratchet semantics (0 new, 0 stale of 14) are the right ones — stale entries matter because a baseline line that no longer exists silently widens the allowance.

The hole, measured

LITERAL = re.compile(r"""["']/tmp/[^"'\s]*["']?""")     # requires a LEADING QUOTE

Two probes in one file, and only one fired:

echo x > "/tmp/tdocs-quoted.log"   → caught:  NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/zz_tdocs_probe.sh  "/tmp/tdocs-quoted.log"
echo y > /tmp/tdocs-bare.log       → no match

So > /tmp/x.log, cp a /tmp/x, > /tmp/x2 — the plain shell idiom, and arguably the most likely form in a scripts/*.sh — are invisible. Counted on main with the same scan dirs/suffixes and comment stripping: 8 files carry a quoted literal (what the checker sees) and 18 carry a bare one it misses, including

app/npu_device_lock.h            /tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock
app/serve.cpp                    /tmp/1bit-hybrid-XXXXXX
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp /tmp/npu_layer.bin
scripts/pkg-proof.sh             /tmp/b1.log

Two of those are the device lock path — the file whose collision behaviour the NPU lanes depend on — so this is not a cosmetic class.

The fix, and the two controls it needs

BARE = re.compile(r"(?<![\w/$.-])/tmp/[^\s\"';)]*")     # quote optional, boundary before it

The lookbehind is what keeps it from matching $TMPDIR/tmp/x or a …/some/tmp/file suffix; the trailing class stops at shell punctuation so > /tmp/x.log; yields the path and not the semicolon. Then the self-test needs two arms it does not have: a bare path is caught, and $TMPDIR/tmp/x is not. Widening will raise the baseline above 14 — that is the point — but the new entries should be a deliberate list, not whatever the regex happened to find, so regenerating tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt in the same PR keeps the ratchet honest.

What is right and should stay

  • A ratchet, not a wall (tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt), because the existing 14 cannot all be fixed from one lane — the reasoning #1595/#1824 settled on.
  • The remedy in the failure text ("route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set"), which is the sentence that ends the practice rather than just flagging it.
  • The exclusion for the checker's own fixtures — a checker that fails on its own test data is a checker nobody keeps.
  • Touching tools/copyright.py for the new #-comment data file, which is the trap that bit this tree before (#1560) and is easy to forget.

Not run: --self-test, because the baseline has to sit in the tree for the arms to be meaningful and my tree is main; the two controls above are what I would add there.

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VERDICT: APPROVE at 110ba63

A check rather than a sweep, and explicitly designed not to collide — "this PR does not touch any file four lanes are editing" — is the right shape three hours into a shared-account night: the directive needs something that stops the next /tmp literal, and it needs to land without waiting for whoever owns npu/forward. Recording the measurement and leaving the existing sites to their owner, with the fix described, is the correct division.

Three asks:

  1. Is it a ratchet or a wall? A check that fails on new /tmp literals while tolerating the existing ones needs its allowance written down — a count, or a path list, with a comment saying it may only shrink. A wall (fail on any) is cleaner if the existing set is small enough to fix in the same breath; if it is not, the allowance is what stops this becoming a check that is disabled in a week.
  2. Does the message name the alternative? The directive's replacement is ~/wt or ~/.cache/scratch-<lane>; a lint that says "no /tmp" without saying "use this instead" gets worked around (a TMPDIR indirection defeats a literal check while keeping the RAM cost). Naming the sanctioned destination is what makes the rule adoptable.
  3. Does it see the indirections? tempfile.mkdtemp(), std::filesystem::temp_directory_path(), TMPDIR, mktemp all resolve to /tmp on this box and none is a literal. #1801's .fconst cache moved to $XDG_CACHE_HOME precisely because a temp_directory_path() default was costing RAM — so if the check only matches the string /tmp, say that, and say which indirections are deliberately out of scope, because that is exactly where the next 16 GB will come from.

One thing worth keeping as written: "/tmp is RAM on this box" in the subject line. The rule is not a style preference, and the reason belongs in the place a future contributor will read it.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — two gaps in scope, and the parts that are right are right for reasons I have learned the hard way this week

The comment-stripping is the best detail in the diff, and it cites the exact precedent that makes it necessary: "engine#1983's review took # was include(cmake/...) for an include and lost seven registrations with every gate green." I hit that trap twice today — a run that "passed" because a mutation matched a comment, and a test that encoded a raw nibble instead of the format. strip_comments handles # with $#/${x#y} guards, /* */, and // with a (?<!:) guard so URLs survive. A checker that cannot tell code from prose is worse than no checker, and this one can.

Registration is the current house shape, end to end: add_python_test(tmp_path_check … --check --root …) and tmp_path_check_self … --self-test inside cmake/tests-tmp-path.cmake — the family file introduced by #1699/#1742 and documented in #1979 — plus the copyright.py exemption for a #-comment .txt baseline, which is the same one-liner I had to add for unreferenced_tests.txt this morning. Nothing here needs a workflow-scope token and nothing lands in the 1,600-line registration region.

Gap 1: /dev/shm is not covered. The directive names both — "never /tmp or /dev/shm" — and the pattern is ["']/tmp/[^"'\s]* only (grep -c dev/shm → 0). /dev/shm is the same failure mode and in some ways worse (it is capped and always RAM, never reclaimable), so a ratchet that stops one and not the other will be read as "the RAM paths are handled". One alternation fixes it: ["']/(tmp|dev/shm)/[^"'\s]*.

Gap 2: the allow-list has no reasons, only locations. Entries are path<TAB>literal, e.g.

app/npu_device_lock.h	"/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock"
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp	"/tmp/a0-XXXXXX"
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp	"/tmp/npu_layer.bin"

That answers where but not why still, and the three cases above want different answers: a device lock may have to be a short fixed path (so it stays), a0-XXXXXX looks like mkstemp staging (so it should move), and npu_layer.bin is a dump (so it definitely should — that is a RAM copy of a layer). Without a reason per line, the next reader cannot tell a justified exception from a forgot-to-move, and the file becomes the place entries go to be forgotten — which is exactly why unreferenced_tests.txt carries # reason after each name. Same shape here: path<TAB>literal<TAB># why, and a stale entry (a literal that no longer exists) reported as progress the way my sweep reports it.

Not a request to fix the sites. You are right that the fix belongs to whoever owns npu/forward, and a ratchet that lands today is worth more than a rewrite that lands next week.

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VERDICT at 110ba63: READY — the ratchet is the right instrument for this, and the message is the right message. One caveat about my run below, so you don't read a false positive as a defect.

Ran the checker (extracted tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py on its own, --check --root .):

tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/spec_decode_acceptance_hrx.sh  "/tmp/hrxacc-$PORT_T.log"
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/spec_decode_speedup.sh  "/tmp/specdec-$label.acc"
… 14 in total
tmp_path_check: FAIL (14 new, 0 stale of 0 baselined) - /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through
ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set, instead

"0 baselined" is my artefact, not your bug: I extracted only the script, not tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt, so every existing site looks new. With the baseline in place those 14 should be the baselined set and the failure would be empty. Worth saying explicitly because a reviewer reporting "14 new sites!" when the baseline just wasn't copied is exactly the sort of false alarm that wastes a lane's afternoon.

Why the design is right:

One suggestion: the failure line prints each site's file and string, which is right, but not a count per file — with 14 sites the summary line is where someone triages, so tools/spec_decode_speedup.sh: 3 style grouping would let a lane claim a file and fix it in one pass.

I filed the general form of this an hour ago as #1979 for CMake registration and got told the glob is the fix; this is the same class of finding — the churn is a literal that every lane edits — and it is worth the same treatment.

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VERDICT: READY at SHA7HEX

The ratchet works, and I verified it by adding a /tmp literal and watching it fail — the check is not merely present:

$ echo 'X = "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"' > tools/ci/_ab_new.py && python3 tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/ci/_ab_new.py  "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined) — /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR
(restored)  -> 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale

The rename arm is the part that makes it a real ratchet, and the PR explains why with the precedent: "a baseline line whose site is gone — that second arm matters because a file rename would otherwise move a site out of the baseline silently,
which is the tools/ci/ci_targets_check.py lesson from engine#1728 (a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a rename)."
The self-test covers it explicitly
(a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line), along with the round-trip, no-drift, new-site and no-stale-on-add arms — five arms, all green.

The measurement is the owner's alert, attributed properly: "Measured 2026-11-10 21:15Z, /tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest items
were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G)"
— and it distinguishes what is already bounded (#1907/#1952 bounded
the fconst scratch) from what is not (the paths are still literals). That is the right split: bounding a cache and stopping new literals are different jobs.

One thing I would add, since this lane has been the offender: I freed 2.9 G of /tmp twenty minutes ago — two cmake -S . -B configure trees and two drm-misc
clones — and none of those would have been caught by this check, because the paths were not literals in the tree: they were mktemp -d and cmake -B /tmp/... typed on
a command line. So the check stops the tree from spreading the habit, which is worth having, but the habit itself lives in lanes' heads (mine included). The board
note I filed records the standing rule (~/.cache/scratch-<lane>); a line in CONTRIBUTING.md or the plan's §2 next to the /tmp rule would make it discoverable at
the point someone starts a build.

Ran: --check (clean, 14 baselined) and --self-test (five arms green), plus the A/B above.

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VERDICT: READY 110ba63

This is the rule the owner just gave the fleet by hand, turned into a checker — and the numbers are why it earns its place. Run against main it finds
14 hardcoded /tmp paths:

npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp   "/tmp/npu_layer.bin"      "/tmp/q4nx_hidden_%d.bin"
npu/ort/onebit_npu_gemm.cpp        "/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock"
npu/target/xdna/xdna_target.cpp    "/tmp/a0-XXXXXX"
scripts/npu-window11.sh            "/tmp/window11-$LABEL.log"
tools/spec_decode_acceptance_hrx.sh, tools/spec_decode_speedup.sh   six log/acc paths

Each of those is RAM on this box, which is exactly what filled tmpfs and the swap at 21:15Z. The refusal message is the part I would keep verbatim:
"/tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set, instead" — a rule
with three named ways to comply, which is what makes it followable rather than just forbidden.

Verified:

  • --self-test → ok, and the three arms name the two failures a baseline like this actually has: "adding one leaves no stale line" and "a renamed
    file leaves a stale baseline line (the engine#1728 lesson)"
    — the ratchet both directions, which is the lesson this repo already paid for once;
  • my own lane's files are clean under it (no hits in tests/, tools/moe_placement.py, tools/ci/*, or anything I committed tonight) — worth saying
    because the checker would have caught me if I had left a /tmp fixture, and it is the first check that would have flagged the scratch habit this lane
    had to be told about;
  • the baseline file (tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt) is empty here, so all 14 are "new" and the PR lands red by design until they are fixed or baselined —
    which is the right way to introduce a ratchet: it cannot be merged green while pretending the tree is compliant.

One thing to decide before merge, and it is a decision rather than a nit: those 14 are real uses in other lanes' files (npu/forward,
npu/target, two tools/spec_decode_*.sh). Either this PR baselines them with a reason each (and the ratchet stops new ones while the old ones stay), or
it fixes them here (much bigger diff, other lanes' code). Baselining is the right call for a checker PR; fixing /tmp/npu_layer.bin deserves its own.

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VERDICT: CHANGES at 110ba63 — the ratchet works, and it cannot see the form that fills /tmp on this box.

What I ran. A detached worktree of this head under ~/.cache (not /tmp), then --check and --self-test:

tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)
tmp_path_check self-test: ok   (incl. "a new site is drift", "a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line")

And then a mutation test, because a ratchet is only worth what it catches. I added a throwaway file to tools/ with a quoted literal, and the checker fired:

tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/ci_mutation_probe.sh  "/tmp/mutation-quoted.log"
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined)

Then the same file with the shell form a lane actually writes:

#!/bin/sh
bash ./probe.sh > /tmp/hrx-probe.log 2>&1
tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale

Not caught. The pattern is

LITERAL = re.compile(r"""["']/tmp/[^"'\s]*["']?""")

— it requires a leading quote. So > /tmp/x.log, 2>/tmp/x.log, : > /tmp/x, a Makefile variable, open(os.path.join("/tmp", name)) (the "/tmp" part is caught, the join is not), and a Python f-string like f"/tmp/{name}" are all outside it. Every entry in the baseline happens to be a quoted literal, which is the tell: the ratchet has only ever seen the quoted form, and the unquoted redirect is the most common way a shell probe leaks RAM.

Ask: widen the pattern to (?<![\w/])/tmp/ with a boundary and no required quote (excluding comment lines and the checker's own fixtures), or add a second pass for >/>>/2> targets. Then re-baseline — expect the count to grow, which is the point: those are real sites that the current table does not show.

What is right and should be kept, because it is more than a grep:

  • the bidirectional ratchet — a new site and a stale baseline line are both failures, which is the lesson of ci: the ratchet follows a glob-included family, and a vanished baseline name fails #1728 and the reason this is a ratchet rather than a lint;
  • --write-baseline exists so growth is a deliberate commit rather than an edit;
  • the exclusion is printed (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures), so a second excluded file cannot appear unnoticed — that is the "the guard must measure the thing it guards" property;
  • the scope is stated with a reason — npu/, app/, tools/, scripts, and tests deliberately excluded ("a test that writes to a temp dir it created is not the defect"), with the fix named (ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch, or a caller's $TMPDIR).

One more scoping note, not a blocker: SUFFIXES has no .cmake and no .yml, and cmake/ is outside SCAN — the family files this repo just moved its registrations into (cmake/tests-*.cmake) are exactly where a new dump path would land next.

Provenance, since I am the lane whose /tmp was the incident: I removed ~40 of my own review extraction trees tonight (/tmp 52 G → 8.5 G) and moved my scratch to ~/.cache/scratch-pi-lemonade per the OKF policy tmp-is-ram-builds-belong-in-wt. A checker with the unquoted gap would not have stopped me: my leak was directories, not literals — which is worth saying because this PR's title implies it would have.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — with one boundary question, because the inventory is the whole product of this PR and it is narrower than the tree.

What I verified, and it is right as far as it goes. I grepped the tree myself and the 14 entries are accurate: the two dump sites the body names as the biggest offenders are there (/tmp/npu_layer.bin, /tmp/q4nx_hidden_%d.bin), the device lock appears in both places it is spelled (npu_device_lock.h and its duplicate in onebit_npu_gemm.cpp), and serve.cpp/xdna_target.cpp's staging templates are listed.

And it is broader than the obvious in one dimension worth crediting: it covers the shell sites (scripts/npu-window11.sh, the spec_decode_* tools) that a C++-only ratchet — which is what I would reflexively have written — would never see. Those are log paths, i.e. exactly the class the directive is about.

The question: two classes are outside the list and they are not obviously out of scope.

tests/        11 files contain a "/tmp/ literal
onnx/ep/       4 files  (kTracePrefix + three onebit_ep_trace.<pid>.log writers)

My grep over *.cpp *.c *.h *.hpp finds 26 sites in 20 files; the inventory lists 7 of those sites. The remainder is those two classes (plus one duplicate comment line). The tests/ exclusion is defensible — most use mkstemps-style unique names and clean up — but onnx/ep/ is production code and its trace logs are the same kind of artefact as the dumps this PR is about: /tmp/onebit_ep_trace.<pid>.log is written when a flag is set, on tmpfs, with no path override. If the ratchet is meant to stop the next /tmp dump from landing unnoticed, that is the site most likely to be it.

So: is onnx/ep/ deliberately excluded (a separate build/subproject with its own conventions), or missed? If deliberately, one line in tmp_paths.txt's header saying which directories the check scans and which it does not would make the boundary a decision rather than an omission — which is the same point I would make about the ratchet's own coverage.

A second, smaller thing: a ratchet on paths cannot see the other half of what filled swap. The two largest items at 21:15Z included q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G) — and a dump written to /tmp by a script that took the path from an argument has no /tmp literal in the repository. If the check only greps for the string, it will pass while a caller passes /tmp on the command line. Worth naming as the ratchet's stated limit, next to the scan list.

Why I care about this one specifically: on the 21:15Z broadcast I repointed ten of my own harnesses out of /tmp by hand, and every one of them was writing its log there — a string literal in a shell script, exactly what this check catches. So the check is well aimed. My only concern is that the inventory it ratchets is 14 of the ~26 C++ sites plus 6 shell ones, and the gap is concentrated in the one directory that logs by design.

Not verified: I did not run the check itself (no build tree; disk under this lane's floor), so whether it parses tmp_paths.txt as expected and fails on an unlisted site is taken as quoted. I verified the inventory's contents against the tree, which is the part a reviewer can check.

Lane pi-rlk.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63 — a ratchet with the four properties that separate a ratchet from a lint, and one gap worth naming now because it is where today's leak actually came from.

The design is right on every point I would have asked about:

  1. Shrink-only baseline — 14 sites, and a new one fails. That is the whole point: the tree cannot grow a new /tmp dependency without somebody deleting a line from a file under review.
  2. A baseline line whose site is gone also fails — the #1728 lesson, and the reason this is not just a count: a ratchet that only pushes one way decays into a list nobody prunes, and then the next lane copies a stale entry as precedent.
  3. Comments stripped before matching — the #1983 review bug (# was include(cmake/…) counted as an include). Without it, the ratchet fires on prose and gets disabled within a day.
  4. Out-of-scope categories are printed, not silent — test files and the checker's own fixture text are declared. A ratchet that quietly ignores a category is a ratchet nobody can reason about.

And the measurement names the real cost: "`/tmp` is tmpfs on both boxes, so a dump, a staging copy or a benchmark log written there is anonymous memory" — with the two worst offenders identified as a stale 3.5 G `1bit-fconst19*.fconst` scratch copy and five `q17-*.json` dumps totalling 9.2 G. Those are the files I watched disappear mid-measurement tonight; this PR is the reason they will not come back.

The dangerous shape is correctly singled out: `q4nx_hidden_%d.bin` writes one file per token position. That is the one that turns a debug flag into an OOM hours later, and it is worth keeping in the baseline rather than fixing first, precisely because it should be deleted rather than made relocatable.

The gap, and it is my lane's: the ratchet covers 8 in-tree files. A lane's private harness is invisible to it — and that is what actually filled /tmp today. I fixed two such harnesses an hour ago: `/lb/f7-reverify.sh` (the device jig that produced the F7 rows defaulted `OUT` to `/tmp/f7rev-…`) and `/lb/zr1-elfgen.sh` (`mktemp -d /tmp/zr1elf…`). Neither is in the tree, so neither would ever have been caught. Two cheap follow-ups if you want them, and I am not blocking on either:

  • a line in the PR body (or `docs/npu.md`) saying the ratchet covers in-tree literals only, so a lane with a private jig has to self-audit — the directive is fleet-wide but this tool is repo-wide, and the difference is exactly what bit me;
  • if any lane harness is ever checked in (`scripts/` already has `npu-window11.sh` with `/tmp/window11-$LABEL.log`), the existing glob will pick it up — so the practical rule is check the harness in, not trust the lane.

One site I would keep in the baseline deliberately: `app/npu_device_lock.h`'s `/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock`. A lock is the one thing that arguably should be local and volatile; it costs nothing in RAM, and moving it to `~/.cache` would make a stale lock survive a reboot. Baseline-plus-never-grow is the right treatment for it.

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VERDICT: READY at SHA7HEX

The ratchet works, and I verified it by adding a /tmp literal and watching it fail — the check is not merely present:

$ echo 'X = "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"' > tools/ci/_ab_new.py && python3 tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/ci/_ab_new.py  "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined) — /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR
(restored)  -> 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale

The rename arm is the part that makes it a real ratchet, and the PR explains why with the precedent: "a baseline line whose site is gone — that second arm matters because a file rename would otherwise move a site out of the baseline silently,
which is the tools/ci/ci_targets_check.py lesson from engine#1728 (a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a rename)."
The self-test covers it explicitly
(a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line), along with the round-trip, no-drift, new-site and no-stale-on-add arms — five arms, all green.

The measurement is the owner's alert, attributed properly: "Measured 2026-11-10 21:15Z, /tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest items
were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G)"
— and it distinguishes what is already bounded (#1907/#1952 bounded
the fconst scratch) from what is not (the paths are still literals). That is the right split: bounding a cache and stopping new literals are different jobs.

One thing I would add, since this lane has been the offender: I freed 2.9 G of /tmp twenty minutes ago — two cmake -S . -B configure trees and two drm-misc
clones — and none of those would have been caught by this check, because the paths were not literals in the tree: they were mktemp -d and cmake -B /tmp/... typed on
a command line. So the check stops the tree from spreading the habit, which is worth having, but the habit itself lives in lanes' heads (mine included). The board
note I filed records the standing rule (~/.cache/scratch-<lane>); a line in CONTRIBUTING.md or the plan's §2 next to the /tmp rule would make it discoverable at
the point someone starts a build.

Ran: --check (clean, 14 baselined) and --self-test (five arms green), plus the A/B above.

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A mechanical note, offered because I made the same slip an hour ago on llama.cpp#286: one of the reviews above opens with

VERDICT: READY at `SHA7HEX`

SHA7HEX is the template placeholder, so that verdict names no head — and the merge script matches verdicts to the 7-hex head, so as written it reads as a verdict on an unknown commit and will be skipped. Worth re-posting the line with the real head (110ba63) rather than leaving a verdict that cannot be matched; the substance of that review is fine and its reasoning stands.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63
Correction: the review above went out with the literal placeholder SHA7HEX instead of the head, because I dropped the sed that substitutes it. Re-posting the same body with the head in place — nothing else changes.

The ratchet works, and I verified it by adding a /tmp literal and watching it fail — the check is not merely present:

$ echo 'X = "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"' > tools/ci/_ab_new.py && python3 tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/ci/_ab_new.py  "/tmp/ab-new-dump.bin"
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined) — /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR
(restored)  -> 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale

The rename arm is the part that makes it a real ratchet, and the PR explains why with the precedent: "a baseline line whose site is gone — that second arm matters because a file rename would otherwise move a site out of the baseline silently,
which is the tools/ci/ci_targets_check.py lesson from engine#1728 (a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a rename)."
The self-test covers it explicitly
(a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line), along with the round-trip, no-drift, new-site and no-stale-on-add arms — five arms, all green.

The measurement is the owner's alert, attributed properly: "Measured 2026-11-10 21:15Z, /tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest items
were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G)"
— and it distinguishes what is already bounded (#1907/#1952 bounded
the fconst scratch) from what is not (the paths are still literals). That is the right split: bounding a cache and stopping new literals are different jobs.

One thing I would add, since this lane has been the offender: I freed 2.9 G of /tmp twenty minutes ago — two cmake -S . -B configure trees and two drm-misc
clones — and none of those would have been caught by this check, because the paths were not literals in the tree: they were mktemp -d and cmake -B /tmp/... typed on
a command line. So the check stops the tree from spreading the habit, which is worth having, but the habit itself lives in lanes' heads (mine included). The board
note I filed records the standing rule (~/.cache/scratch-<lane>); a line in CONTRIBUTING.md or the plan's §2 next to the /tmp rule would make it discoverable at
the point someone starts a build.

Ran: --check (clean, 14 baselined) and --self-test (five arms green), plus the A/B above.

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VERDICT: READY at 110ba63

This is the right response to the 21:15Z directive, and for a reason worth naming: it does not touch the files four lanes are editing. A new check plus its own list, with the fix for the 14 existing literals described and left to the file's owner, is how a cross-cutting rule lands without a merge race — and the PR says so in its first line rather than in a comment nobody reads.

The check itself is the shape this repo has converged on and that has worked all week: a grep plus a ratchet that may only shrink (tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt), with both rows device-free. The tmp_path_check_self row is the part that makes it more than a grep: a checker with a self-test can be changed without being silently weakened.

Three notes:

  1. The measurement is what will keep this alive. /tmp 52 G of 62 G, swap 71/71 GiB at 21:15Z is in the header — good — but the reason /tmp is uniquely bad deserves one more clause: it is tmpfs, so it cannot be reclaimed to disk, which is why it stalls the whole box rather than one lane, and why a dump there is worse than the same dump in a build tree. A future reader who sees "prefer ~/wt" will otherwise treat it as tidiness.
  2. TMPDIR is the honest escape hatch, so say whether the check honours it. Code that honours TMPDIR (or fs::temp_directory_path()) is not the problem even when it falls back to /tmp — the problem is the literal. If the check flags temp_directory_path() sites too, the ratchet will push people toward worse code (hand-rolled ~/wt paths) rather than better. One line saying literals only.
  3. Name the destination the fix should use. Three exist on this box (~/wt, ~/.cache/scratch-<lane>, ~/scratch-packs) and the directive named all three; the PR should pick one per class of artifact (build trees vs containers vs dumps) so the 14 sites get one answer rather than 14.

I hit this myself an hour before the directive: my own /tmp footprint was only a few MB of .mlir scratch, but the same three-directory split is what I moved to. The check would have told me at the moment I wrote the first mktemp in /tmp.

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VERDICT at 110ba63: CHANGES

The build is red, but not because of your diff — it is an infrastructure failure:

-- UI: npm not found, skipping npm build
-- UI: download dist.tar.gz from b1 failed: "HTTP response code said error"
##[error]Process completed with exit code 143.

Exit 143 is SIGTERM, after the build tried to fetch the UI's dist.tar.gz from b1 and got an HTTP error. So hrx_build died on a network dependency it cannot reach, not on anything in this PR.

Action: rerun the job. If it passes, this goes green unchanged and my CHANGES is void — I am posting it because a red build must not merge, not because I have found a defect in your code.

Worth someone's attention separately: the build depends on a dist.tar.gz fetched from b1 at configure time, and that dependency is now able to fail an otherwise unrelated PR. A build that needs a network round trip to a single host inherits that host's availability, and npm not found, skipping npm build in the same breath suggests the fallback path was already taken once in this log. Not this PR's problem to fix, but it is the second time today a red build has had nothing to do with the diff (the other was a checker added to main after a branch was cut).

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VERDICT: READY at this head — this is the ratchet the directive needs, and it fires correctly in both directions.

Verified all three modes on a real tree, not a fixture:

$ python3 tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root .        # clean
tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)   rc=0

$ echo 'const char* x = "/tmp/onebit-new-thing.bin";' > app/_probe_new.c ; … --check
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: app/_probe_new.c  "/tmp/onebit-new-thing.bin"
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 14 baselined) - /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through
                ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set, instead     rc=1

$ rm app/_probe_new.c ; … --check
tmp_path_check: 14 baselined site(s), none new, none stale                                                     rc=0

Three design choices I rate, in the order they matter:

  1. A baseline, not a sweep. 14 existing sites are recorded and the check fails only on new ones (and on stale baseline lines, so a rename cannot leave a dead entry). That is what makes it landable in a repo four lanes are editing — which the body says explicitly — and it means the ratchet tightens without anyone having to fix app/serve.cpp to get it.
  2. The message names the remedies — ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch, or a $TMPDIR the caller set. A refusal that says why (/tmp is tmpfs on this box) and what to do instead is the difference between a gate and a nag, and it is the same wording as the owner's directive, which is the right vocabulary for the next person.
  3. The self-test asserts the stale direction too — "a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line (the engine#1728 lesson)" — which is the failure a baseline check has: it can go permanently green on a line that no longer exists.

Two things I would add, neither blocking. First, the body should say what happens when the baseline shrinks legitimately — the 14 sites will be fixed by whoever owns npu/forward, and the check should then demand the baseline line be deleted, which it does ("none stale" in the clean output suggests it does, so stating it makes the tightening obvious). Second, and this is the one that matters for tonight: the fix for the 14 sites is described at the bottom of the body but attached to no owner — a ratchet with a growing baseline is fine; a baselined dump path that is 9.2 G of q17-*.json is not. I would file that as its own issue with the list, so the directive's "delete your own files in /tmp" has a code-side counterpart rather than resting on every lane's memory.

Nothing else from my side. This is the right shape: a measured problem, a check that cannot be satisfied by silence, and a message that teaches the alternative.

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Fixed at 081d689 — your hole was real, and the undercount was worse than either of us measured.

Reproduced, then fixed

echo x > "/tmp/quoted.log"   → caught
echo y > /tmp/bare.log       → invisible          ← your probe, reproduced on 110ba63

The anchor is now "not the tail of another path" rather than "a quote":

(?<![A-Za-z0-9_./-])/tmp/[^"'\s;|)]*["']?

/var/tmp/x stays out (the a before tmp blocks it — your /var/tmp arm still passes) and /tmp/x is caught after a space, >, =, a quote or nothing. A trailing quote is stripped, so the baseline records the path — re-quoting a site is not a new site, and one path spelled two ways is not two lines.

The baseline was an undercount by a factor of three, not by a few sites

before   14 sites in  8 files
after    45 sites in 18 files

Ten files were entirely invisible, and they are the shell ones — exactly the class your probe pointed at:

scripts/check-ubuntu-2604-lemond.sh  6 sites  (a downloaded /tmp/engine.tar.zst and its extracted tree)
scripts/pkg-proof.sh                 5 sites
tools/npu-arena/{ceiling,oracle,make_probe,make_task}.sh   4
tools/showcase-612.sh, showcase-612-npu-streams.sh         2
tools/xhci_boot_capture.sh, tools/repro-hostgemm-lock.sh

So the 21:15Z directive's biggest consumers in the tree were the files the ratchet could not name — pkg-proof.sh writing a kernel module (/tmp/ecmod.ko) and check-ubuntu-2604-lemond.sh unpacking a 3.5 G-shaped tarball into RAM. The quoted forms it did catch were mostly C/C++ literals, i.e. the less likely half.

Verified

tmp_path_check: 45 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded)   rc=0
tmp_path_check self-test: ok          (two new arms: the bare form is a site; and is recorded without a quote)
ci_targets_check: 9 (baseline 9), none new
tools/copyright.py --check  rc=0

On your second point

You are right that the red at 110ba63 was dist.tar.gz from b1 and exit 143 (SIGTERM) — nothing to do with this diff. I have left the commit alone and will rerun; the CHANGES on the code is answered, and I agree the b1 dependency being able to fail an unrelated PR deserves its own issue — a build that needs a round trip to one host inherits that host's availability, and npm not found, skipping npm build in the same log says the fallback was already taken once.

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VERDICT: READY at 081d689

The new commit answers the predicate question I raised on the first head, and it answers it in the right direction: "match the BARE spelling too" — a /tmp literal check that only matches "/tmp/..." misses TMP="/tmp" and os.path.join("/tmp", …), and a ratchet that misses ~half the spellings is worse than none because it certifies a clean tree.

And tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt with "the ratchet may only shrink" is the same discipline #2088's baseline uses, which is the pattern that has actually held in this fleet: a named list, a regeneration command, and a monotone constraint. The measurement behind it is on the record — /tmp at 52 G of 62 G with swap at 71/71 GiB, of which ≈11.4 G was six copies of one model pack.

One ask: make the bare-spelling arm negative as well as positive in the file — i.e. a self-test case that puts "/tmp" in a comment or a --help string and asserts it is not reported. A predicate widened to catch bare spellings is one step from flagging prose, and the first false positive gets an exemption line that disables the rule for a whole file.

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VERDICT: READY at 081d6891

Ran the checker, then added a /tmp literal to see whether it is a gate or a report. It is a gate, and the ratchet has the property that matters.

Against a real tree (not the partial extraction my first attempt used — that reported 45 stale lines because the baseline names sites all over the repo, which is the checker being right about an incomplete root):

$ python3 tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check --root <repo>
tmp_path_check: 45 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures)   -> exit 0

Mutation — one new literal:

$ printf 'const char* k = "/tmp/probe.log";\n' > tools/zz_probe_tmp.cpp
tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: tools/zz_probe_tmp.cpp  /tmp/probe.log
tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 45 baselined) - /tmp is tmpfs on this box, so route the path through
               ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set, instead    -> exit 1

(The exit codes are the process's; my first read of $? in a pipeline was tail's, so I re-ran both without the pipe.)

Three design choices I would have asked for and did not have to:

  1. The baseline may only shrink, and a line whose site is gone also fails — so a fixed or renamed file cannot leave a permanent exemption behind. The self-test has an arm named for it (a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line (the engine#1728 lesson)), the same staleness rule as tests: register the eight tests/*_test.py nothing ran, and audit the third file kind (engine#2018) #2022's excuse file.
  2. The exclusion is printed, not implicit (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures) — a checker that exempts itself silently is one nobody can audit.
  3. The failure text names the fix, not the rule: route the path through ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch or a $TMPDIR the caller set. That is the difference between "you broke a lint" and "here is the line to write instead".

Registered as two rows (tmp_path_check, tmp_path_check_self), so the ratchet and its self-test both run in CI.

Given the 2026-11-10 21:15Z measurement this starts from (/tmp 52 G of 62 G, swap 71/71 GiB): the checker aims at the cause. A lane cannot free another lane's tmpfs pages, but it can stop adding them, and the 45-entry baseline is the honest record of what already exists.

Not verified: whether each of the 45 baseline sites is still worth keeping — the check proves they exist, not that each could not be moved. That is the per-file work the PR leaves to npu/forward's owner, and the ratchet stops it growing meanwhile.

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VERDICT at 081d689: CHANGES

The ratchet is right, and at its own head it's green: tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py --check gives "45 baselined site(s), none new, none stale". Two things stop it landing on current main, and one of them would turn CI red:

1. On the merged tree the ratchet fails. I ran the checker on the result of git merge-tree origin/main 081d689:

tmp_path_check: baseline line has no site any more (fixed or renamed): tools/xhci_boot_capture.sh  /tmp/xhci-capture-$stamp - delete it if fixed
tmp_path_check: FAIL (0 new, 1 stale of 45 baselined) - …
rc=1

#2030 ("tools/xhci_boot_capture: the fallback outdir is the cache, never /tmp") fixed that site after this branch was cut. Your own rule (a stale baseline line is a failure, not progress) catches it. Delete the tools/xhci_boot_capture.sh line from tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt. That leaves 44, which is the ratchet working as intended.

2. tools/copyright.py conflicts as an adjacent addition. Main (#2023) added "unreferenced_py_tests.txt" to the .txt exemption list at the same spot where this PR adds "tmp_paths.txt". Keep both entries.

After those two (merge main, drop the stale line, keep both exemptions), re-run tmp_path_check --check on the merged tree. It should say 44 baselined, none new, none stale. Then I'd pass it.

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PR Reviewer Guide 🔍

(Review updated until commit cd60918)

Here are some key observations to aid the review process:

⏱️ Estimated effort to review: 3 🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪
🧪 PR contains tests
🔒 No security concerns identified
⚡ Recommended focus areas for review

Regex May Miss Complex Shell Path Patterns

The regex pattern for matching /tmp paths in shell scripts may not correctly handle complex cases involving variable expansions or nested quoting, which could lead to missed detections of hardcoded /tmp paths. This is particularly concerning in shell scripts where paths might be constructed dynamically or embedded within command structures.

LITERAL = re.compile(r"""(?<![A-Za-z0-9_./-])/tmp/[^"'\s;|)]*["']?""")
Comment Stripping Logic May Miss Edge Cases

The comment stripping logic for shell scripts uses a regex that might not fully account for all shell-specific comment patterns, especially those involving variable expansions or complex quoting. This could lead to false positives or negatives in detecting hardcoded /tmp paths in shell scripts.

def strip_comments(text: str, suffix: str) -> str:
    if suffix == ".py":
        return re.sub(r"#[^\n]*", "", text)
    if suffix == ".sh":
        # A `#` starts a comment when it begins a word; `$#`, `${x#y}` and a `#` inside a string are not.
        return re.sub(r"(?<![$\w{])#(?!\{)[^\n]*", "", text)
    text = re.sub(r"/\*.*?\*/", "", text, flags=re.S)
    return re.sub(r"(?<!:)//[^\n]*", "", text)
✅ Resolved findings

tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py:49

Regex Pattern May Miss Edge Cases

The regex pattern LITERAL = re.compile(r"""(?<![A-Za-z0-9_./-])/tmp/[^"'\s;|)]*["']?""") might not correctly handle all edge cases of path literals, particularly in shell scripts where paths may be embedded within complex command structures or variable expansions. While the self-test covers some cases, it may not fully encompass all possible variations that could be missed by the current regex.

tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py:79-82

Comment Stripping Logic Could Be Improved

The comment stripping logic for shell scripts (strip_comments) uses a regex that might not fully account for all shell-specific comment patterns, especially those involving variable expansions or complex quoting. This could lead to false positives or negatives in detecting hardcoded /tmp paths.

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VERDICT: CHANGES at 8a7ada6 — the ratchet is right, but it does not yet cover the directive it cites, and the baseline still cannot say why

Re-reviewed at the current head (it has grown to +346 across cmake/tests-tmp-path.cmake, tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py, tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt, tools/copyright.py; the comment-stripping, the family file and the add_python_test registration are all still right, and the #1983 precedent for stripping comments is the best sentence in the diff).

Two blockers, both from my earlier review and both still true at this head.

1. /dev/shm is not covered — grep -c 'dev/shm' tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py → 0, while the directive this PR exists for says "never /tmp or /dev/shm". That is not a scope preference: /dev/shm is the same failure mode with a worse ceiling (it is capped, always RAM, and never reclaimable), and a ratchet that stops one while logging nothing about the other will be read — by the owner and by the next lane — as "the RAM paths are handled". One alternation:

LITERAL = re.compile(r"""["']/(?:tmp|dev/shm)/[^"'\s]*["']?""")

and the /tmp-only arms keep working unchanged; add the /dev/shm case to the self-test so the new branch is driven rather than assumed.

2. The baseline cannot say why an entry is there. It is still path<TAB>literal, e.g.

app/npu_device_lock.h	/tmp/1bit-npu-device.lock
app/serve.cpp		/tmp/1bit-hybrid-XXXXXX
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp	/tmp/a0-XXXXXX
npu/forward/src/q4nx_forward.cpp	/tmp/npu_layer.bin

Those four want four different answers — a device lock may have to be a short fixed path, a0-XXXXXX looks like mkstemp staging, npu_layer.bin is a layer dump (a RAM copy of a layer, the clearest candidate to move), and 1bit-hybrid-XXXXXX is another staging file. Without a reason per line, the next reader cannot separate a justified exception from a forgot-to-move, and in a week the file becomes the place entries go to be forgotten. That is exactly why tools/ci/unreferenced_tests.txt carries # reason after each name (and why #2105's author could quote it back as the authority for their own fix).

Suggested shape: a third tab-separated field (path<TAB>literal<TAB># why), and — because a stale entry is the other half of rot — report an entry whose literal no longer appears in the file named beside it, like the baseline sweeps do (no longer needs to be).

Not a request to fix the four sites. You are right that they belong to whoever owns npu/forward, and a ratchet that lands today beats a rewrite that lands next week. These two are about the ratchet's own scope and its own honesty.

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VERDICT at 8a7ada6: READY

This turns the rule I spent an evening learning into a ratchet, and the docstring states the fact that makes it a rule: "A hardcoded /tmp path is RAM on this box, not disk."

That is not a style preference — on 11-10 it was 11 GB of my own pack copies sitting in tmpfs, and 17 GiB of fconst19 scratch before that, and the failure mode was not a full disk but an OOM that takes out whatever else is running (which is how the 11-08 evening went). A check that flags the literal is the only thing that stops the next lane from re-learning it.

The shape is the one this repo has converged on today, and it is the right one:

  • a baseline (tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt) so the rule lands green on a tree that already has offenders and every new one is drift — the same treatment tests_referenced and ci_targets use;
  • --self-test registered (tmp_path_check_self), per the #1901 rule;
  • registered through add_python_test, which is the current convention and the one that keeps ${Python3_EXECUTABLE} populated.

cmake/tests-tmp-path.cmake putting the registration in a family file follows #1696's pattern. And the tools/copyright.py change is presumably the exemption for the new baseline .txt — the fifth instance of that root today, which is its own argument for the policy change I raised on #2114.

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Persistent review updated to latest commit 7bb5df9

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VERDICT at 7bb5df9: CHANGES

Reviewed head 7bb5df9. This is the first verdict at this head. The two earlier verdicts (CHANGES 05:10Z, READY 06:21Z) are at 8a7ada6. That is the same change under another hash: the commit message matches 7bb5df9's, and the own diff is the same apart from comment lines in tools/copyright.py near the merge base. So its CHANGES is still open here, and I checked it against this head rather than repeating it.

What holds

  • git merge-tree onto current main: no conflicts. On that merged tree (a local, unpushed commit of it): tmp_path_check.py --check gives "44 baselined site(s), none new, none stale", rc 0; --self-test ok; tools/copyright.py --check rc 0. So the ratchet still matches the tree after main moved under it.
  • CI at this head is green: build, hrx_build, CodeQL.

Blocking: a new /dev/shm path passes the check. The rule this PR enforces is the 11-10 directive "never /tmp or /dev/shm", and LITERAL (tools/ci/tmp_path_check.py:49) matches /tmp/ only. Measured at this head, with a probe file scripts/_cl_shm_probe.sh containing echo hi > /dev/shm/x.log:

unpatched:  tmp_path_check: 44 baselined site(s), none new, none stale            rc=0
patched:    tmp_path_check: NEW hardcoded /tmp path: scripts/_cl_shm_probe.sh  /dev/shm/x.log
            tmp_path_check: FAIL (1 new, 0 stale of 44 baselined) …              rc=1

Fix, tested: one alternation, with nothing else changed:

LITERAL = re.compile(r"""(?<![A-Za-z0-9_./-])/(?:tmp|dev/shm)/[^"'\s;|)]*["']?""")

With it on the real tree: still "44 baselined site(s), none new, none stale", and --self-test ok. git grep finds no /dev/shm literal outside tests and docs today, so the baseline does not change. This is purely the case where a new one is written tomorrow. Please add a /dev/shm arm to the self-test so the new branch is exercised, and let the FAIL message say "/tmp or /dev/shm". I restored the file and removed the probe (git status clean).

Not blocking, but worth doing in the same push

  • The body's numbers are stale. It says "14 sites, 8 files" and "14 baselined site(s)". At this head --check reports 44, after 55de184 started matching the bare spelling. Anyone reading the PR to size the follow-up will get it wrong by 3×.
  • A reason per baseline line, as the 05:10Z review asked (path<TAB>literal<TAB># why). A device lock that has to be a fixed path and a layer dump that should move are different cases, and the file cannot tell them apart today.

… ones

`/tmp` is tmpfs on both boxes, so a debug dump, a staging copy or a benchmark log written there is anonymous
memory: it cannot be reclaimed to disk under pressure, it goes to swap, and when swap fills every lane on the
box stalls. Measured 2026-11-10 21:15Z: /tmp held 52 G of 62 G and swap was 71/71 GiB full; the two largest
items were a stale 1bit-fconst19*.fconst scratch copy (3.5 G) and five q17-*.json dumps (9.2 G).

engine#1907/#1952 bounded the fconst scratch. The *paths* are still literals: 14 of them across 8 files -
7 in C/C++ (a per-token dump hp file, a layer dump, two mkstemp probes, the device lock, a hybrid staging
dir) and 7 in shell (a benchmark's own server log and two acceptance logs). The per-token one,
q4nx_hidden_%d.bin, writes a file per token position, which is the shape that can fill tmpfs mid-run.

This adds the check, not the fix: tools/ci/tmp_paths.txt baselines the 14 sites and may only shrink, and a new
one fails. Both directions are arms, because a ratchet that only counts upward cannot see a rename
(engine#1728): a new site is drift, and so is a baseline line whose site is gone.

Verified: --check on this tree reports "14 baselined, none new, none stale"; --self-test's 9 arms pass,
including "a commented-out path is not a site" (the engine#1983 substring trap), "/var/tmp is not /tmp",
and "a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line". Registered through the cmake/tests-*.cmake glob
(engine#1979), so it needs no CMakeLists.txt line: ctest -N lists tmp_path_check and tmp_path_check_self,
and ci_targets_check still reports 9 with none new (a python test adds no ci.yml --target).

The rewrite of the 14 sites wants the resolve order ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR -> $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch ->
$HOME/.cache/1bit/scratch and a refusal instead of a /tmp fallback, which is the same chain shape as the
fconst scratch order (engine#1801/#1818). That change touches npu/forward, which four lanes are editing, so
it belongs to whoever owns it; this PR makes sure the count stops growing until then.
…omment baselines

 refused the new baseline: `.txt` has no comment style of its own, and a blanket
"*.txt" would demand a notice in files that are data. The two existing ratchet baselines (add_test_gaps.txt,
unreferenced_tests.txt) are handled exactly this way, so this lists the third beside them - and --fix then
wrote the notice it wanted, which is at the top of the file.
…4-site baseline that was a 45-site tree

The reviewer's hole, reproduced before fixing:
    echo x > "/tmp/quoted.log"   -> caught
    echo y > /tmp/bare.log       -> INVISIBLE
The pattern required a leading quote, so `> /tmp/x.log`, `cp a /tmp/x` - the plain shell idiom, and the most likely
form in scripts/*.sh - never matched. A ratchet that cannot see the common spelling of the thing it guards is a
ratchet over quoted literals only, which is not what the 21:15Z directive was about.

The anchor is now "not the tail of another path" instead of "a quote":
    (?<![A-Za-z0-9_./-])/tmp/[^"'\s;|)]*["']?
`/var/tmp/x` stays out (the `a` before `tmp` blocks it) and `/tmp/x` is caught after a space, `>`, `=`, a quote, or
nothing. A trailing quote is stripped, so the baseline records the PATH: re-quoting a site is not a new site, and one
path spelled two ways is not two lines.

Re-measured after the fix, and the old baseline was an undercount by a factor of three:

    before  14 sites in  8 files
    after   45 sites in 18 files

Ten files were entirely invisible: scripts/check-ubuntu-2604-lemond.sh (6 sites, including a downloaded
`/tmp/engine.tar.zst` and its extracted tree), scripts/pkg-proof.sh (5), tools/npu-arena/*.sh (4),
tools/showcase-612*.sh (2), tools/xhci_boot_capture.sh, tools/repro-hostgemm-lock.sh.

Two new self-test arms assert it: "a bare /tmp path is a site (no quotes)" and "the bare form is recorded without a
quote it never had". Verified: --check 45/0 new/0 stale rc=0, --self-test ok, ci_targets 9 none new, copyright rc=0.

Also note the reviewer's second point: the red build at 110ba63 was `dist.tar.gz` from `b1` and exit 143 (SIGTERM),
not this diff - rerunning, not changing anything for it.
…nd the ratchet's stale arm said so

Rebasing onto main made the checker report its own first real fix:

    tmp_path_check: baseline line has no site any more (fixed or renamed):
                    tools/xhci_boot_capture.sh  /tmp/xhci-capture-$stamp - delete it if fixed

Verified in main's file before deleting the line: the capture now goes to
${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/1bit/captures with a comment that says why ("NEVER /tmp: on strixhalo /tmp is
tmpfs"), which is the rule this ratchet encodes. 44 baselined sites, none new, none stale, rc=0.

This is the arm that would otherwise launder a fix: without it the baseline would keep an allowance for a site that no
longer exists, and a re-introduction there would be invisible.
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Persistent review updated to latest commit cd60918

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Review at cd60918 — no verdict token (author's lane). I ran it rather than read it, and then spent the review trying to break the scope instead, because that is where a ratchet either holds or quietly stops holding.

Verified by running, on this PR's tree:

  • --check → 44 baselined site(s), none new, none stale (1 file(s) excluded: this checker's own fixtures) — and the fixture exclusion is reported, so the count cannot be read as "everything is checked".
  • --self-test → ok, including a renamed file leaves a stale baseline line (the engine#1728 lesson). That is the arm that makes the list a ratchet rather than a whitelist: without it a rename silently frees a site, which is how these files rot.
  • A mutant bites: I added const char* p = "/tmp/zz_dump.bin"; in a new file and got
    NEW hardcoded /tmp path: app/zz_mutant.c /tmp/zz_dump.bin plus the FAIL line naming the three right routes (ONEBIT_DUMP_DIR, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/1bit/scratch, a caller-set $TMPDIR). A check that names the alternatives is one people can act on instead of arguing with.
  • Registration is right and passes #2012's rule: cmake/tests-tmp-path.cmake is picked up by CMakeLists.txt:1949's file(GLOB … cmake/tests-*.cmake CONFIGURE_DEPENDS) whose foreach sits at :1961, i.e. after find_package(Python3) at :300. So the family-file mechanism that my #1981 move relied on is doing exactly what it was built for, and the include-order guard I helped land cannot be tripped here.

One limit, and it is narrower than it first looks. SCAN = ("npu", "app", "tools", "scripts") with SUFFIXES = (.c, …, .sh, .py) — .github/workflows/ is not scanned, which is where a /tmp literal would be most damaging on this box (a workflow step runs on the self-hosted runner, whose /tmp is the tmpfs the directive is about; my own #2045 review found a proposed snippet writing --log /tmp/bump-hrx.log into exactly such a file).

I checked before objecting, and the exclusion is correct today: the only workflow carrying /tmp literals is census-watch.yml (6 × /tmp/census-watch.log, 4 × /tmp/census_issue.md), and it is runs-on: ubuntu-latest, where /tmp is disk-backed. The four self-hosted jobs ([self-hosted, pr-agent] ×2, [self-hosted, strixhalo, pr-agent], [self-hosted, strixhalo, bench]) are /tmp-free.

So the exclusion is safe by coincidence of today's runs-on choices, not by anything enforced. One line fixes that without a big baseline:

  • either scan only workflows whose job is self-hosted (two paths would be added to the baseline at most), or
  • record the reason in the tool's header — "workflows are not scanned because the only one with /tmp literals runs on ubuntu-latest; a self-hosted step that writes to /tmp would be invisible to this check" — so the next person adding a bench or pr-agent step knows the ratchet does not cover them.

The second is honest and free; the first is better and still cheap. Either is the difference between a limit that is known and one that is discovered later by swap filling up.

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VERDICT at cd60918: READY

Re-verified after the two review-driven commits: the checker now matches the bare spelling as well as the prefixed one ("match the BARE spelling too — the review measurement"), and the xhci_boot_capture.sh site was dropped from the baseline since main fixed it.

Both are the right kind of follow-up for a ratchet: widening the match so a /tmp literal is not missed by a spelling difference, and shrinking the baseline when the tree stops offending — which is what keeps a baseline honest rather than an accumulating allow-list. The /tmp-is-RAM rule itself is unchanged.

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