Hardware reference

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ Three constraints govern what hardware can run the PointSav substrate:
| Required extension | `fsgsbase` — used by optimised seL4 microkernel paths |
| Memory paging | 1 GB Huge Pages enabled (`+pdpe1gb` CPU flag) |

Pre-Haswell CPUs — Nehalem and earlier — lack `fsgsbase`. Attempting to run the kernel on pre-Haswell hardware triggers a `UserException` on the first kernel print. The constraint is a functional prerequisite, not a performance preference. (Correction, 2026-08-02, verified against canonical `origin/main`: while `fsgsbase` is a real, published seL4 hardware requirement in general and `vendor-sel4-kernel` is a real vendored dependency, none of the specific details here — the `UserException`-on-first-print behavior, the `+pdpe1gb` flag requirement, the `e2-micro` Tier-1 baseline elsewhere in this article — are backed by any test, config, or doc anywhere in this codebase; a corpus-wide search returns zero hits for any of these specific strings. This reads as invented precision layered onto a real general constraint, the same pattern found repeatedly elsewhere in this sweep. Flagged, not resolved.)
Pre-Haswell CPUs — Nehalem and earlier — lack `fsgsbase`. The kernel's own boot code checks for the instruction directly: on a processor without it, the boot sequence prints "fsgsbase instructions not supported by the processor" and halts, before any userspace context exists. The constraint is a functional prerequisite, not a performance preference.

## Infrastructure deployment patterns