Diagnostics module¶
What it does¶
Diagnostics runs measurements that are too costly, invasive, or specialized for idle collection. Each diagnostic must state its cost before execution.
Wire timing is the one free instrument here. It reports how long the selected machine takes to notice a request — the interval between its own wire service passes, and the delay from the network stack announcing data to its event loop reading it — as histograms rather than medians, because the tail is what a person feels. The link's own timing (round trip, receive window, window peak, quiet time) is read beside it; those rows describe the wire, not the machine's networking, so they are not on the Networking page.
Availability¶
PowerPC has the full page. NOW-68K exposes selected diagnostics such as VRAM and screenshot-source probes through the console rather than a matching page.
On the modern Mac¶
The host selects a named machine and records the request, status, and returned evidence. It must not turn a timeout into a measurement.
On the classic Mac¶
The PowerPC page states cost and progress. The 68K console's vprobe and
shotdiag commands use the same bounded diagnostic implementations as wire
calls.
Common tasks¶
- Read the cost and required rig before running a diagnostic.
- Save the resulting build, machine, port, and artifact identity with numbers.
Safety, consent, and privacy¶
Some diagnostics allocate scarce classic memory, read the display, or hold a transfer lane. Do not run them during unrelated machine use.
Failure states¶
Not armed, unsafe on this machine, unavailable manager, timed out, partial, and result-buffer limit are different outcomes.
Current limitations¶
An instrument that wrote no artifact cannot support an absence claim. A count not derived from the stored result is not evidence.
Wire timing is read-only from the modern Mac. The same verb can also change the classic Mac's idle sleep and turn its wake notifier off; those knobs stay on that machine's own console, because they alter how it schedules every application it is running. NOW-68K has nothing to answer here: the wake is an Open Transport notifier and that guest speaks MacTCP.