waiOS · Policy

Write the policy once. Apply it everywhere it runs.

waiOS will hold an organisation's WAI policy in one place: which capabilities may run, under which licence classes, at which determinism tiers and within which energy budgets. It will apply that policy to every runtime and every delivery. Each policy will be digested, so every decision will name the exact policy it applied.

Roadmap Not yet operating. Each open component below is labelled with where it stands on the WAI status page.

The three labels

In the standard
The open component is in the main branch of the WAI open standard. Its link goes to its row on the dated WAI status page, and its notes are that row's.
Building
The open component is in active development, as the WAI status page lists it.
Roadmap
Planned: a WAI roadmap item, or a waiOS service. Every waiOS service is on the roadmap; none is operating yet.

Attested, in WAI, means signed by the party that did the work and measured it: a reader can check the signature, not re-measure the figure. It is not hardware attestation.

01 · The service

What waiOS will hold and apply.

  • Capabilities allowed or refused by licence class, so a deployment runs only the codecs the organisation has cleared.
  • A determinism tier required per use. For example, only integer-exact capabilities where a reconstruction must be reproduced exactly.
  • Energy budgets per session class. Under a budget, the rendition choice never rises.
  • Packaging policies applied by digest, so every package records the policy it was packed under.
  • Policy decisions recorded in a signed record that names the policy's digest. That record is new waiOS work: WAI has no policy-decision receipt class.
02 · Builds on

Open components, each with its WAI label.

  • In the standard

    A licence class for each capability in the codec registry, queryable in code.

    Notes The deployer enforces it.

  • In the standard

    Capability constraint sets, evaluated before dispatch.

    Notes Specification text.

  • In the standard

    Determinism tiers, typed in code.

  • In the standard

    A packaging policy digested over its canonical form, so two spellings of one policy have one digest.

  • In the standard

    Rendition switching in integers, within stated bounds. Under a joule budget the choice is never raised.

  • In the standard

    A payload's cost read from its header, so a sink can refuse by its own limit before decoding.

    Notes The header bounds the work; a small payload may describe a large output, and a sink applies its own size policy before decoding.

03 · Roadmap

Planned, in the standard and in the service.

  • Roadmap· waiOS

    Policy authoring, and distribution to the fleet.

  • Roadmap· waiOS

    A policy-decision record format and its verifier. New work, not in the standard.

04 · Limits

What this page does not claim.

  • A licence class records the licence a codec's publisher grants. It is not a legal opinion about third-party claims.
  • Capability constraint sets are specification text; the reference implementation has no evaluator for them.
  • A policy-decision record will be a waiOS format. The open WAI verifiers do not check it.
05 · Read next

The text behind this page.