Protocol 1.0 release notes

Status: frozen portable protocol 1.0 candidate after the v1.0 freeze audit.

The release surface is the portable protocol and Rust foundation for transport-neutral accelerator devices. It does not assign a Virtio device ID, standardize an NPU graph/compiler IR, or include platform adapters.

Frozen artifacts

• Normative text: specification.md, wire-abi.md, and virtqueue.md.
• Wire and conformance artifacts: conformance/v1.0.
• Evolution policy: release-policy.md.
• Public Rust API documentation policy: public-api.md.
• Portability matrix: portability.md.
• Threat model: threat-model.md.
• Performance posture: performance.md.

The protocol 1.0 assigned constants, exact structure layouts, canonical frame bytes, scenario traces, and hot-path budgets are frozen in conformance/v1.0. Post-freeze incompatible wire or semantic changes require a new protocol major version and a new conformance directory.

Baseline included in 1.0

• one command virtqueue at index zero;
• device discovery and exact protocol compatibility checks;
• contexts, buffers, opaque programs, execution queues, submissions, and events;
• bounded explicit buffer transfers;
• event polling, optional cancellation, release, reset, and backend-discard recovery;
• direct-binding requirements for program-visible buffers; and
• checked finite limits for untrusted byte counts, descriptor counts, object counts, and retained backend storage.

Deferred optional features

The following positions remain reserved and unadvertised in protocol 1.0:

• multi-queue;
• event queues;
• external memory import/export;
• timeline fences;
• secure contexts;
• packed virtqueues;
• concrete VMM, kernel, OS, and vendor SDK adapters; and
• standardized graph IR, compiler, or executable formats.

An implementation that advertises one of those features is not protocol 1.0 conformant unless a future version assigns its negotiation, ownership, synchronization, and conformance rules.

Release evidence

The freeze audit links every reviewed area to executable or documented evidence: conformance/v1.0/freeze-audit.md.

The clean-room Rust codec remains dependency-free and decodes/encodes canonical bytes without importing the primary protocol types. The backend conformance suite exercises the semantic provider contract without wire, virtqueue, OS, or vendor dependencies.