M3 was recorded as code complete. Its exit criteria named the HEVC gpu_smoke
and gpu_parity legs, and the goldens for them were committed — 250 per-frame
NV12 hashes, cross-checked between two independent FFmpeg builds, with a
header saying they are "consumed the same way by the HEVC parity test". No
such test existed. Both GPU files were H.264 only, with zero references to
h265, so nothing had ever decoded a single HEVC frame through this crate on
hardware.
They exist now, and the first run answered. On AMD Adrenalin 25.10.30.02
(distinct mode, queryResultStatusSupport=false) 247 of 250 frames diverge
from libavcodec, and that device's smoke leg PASSES — because smoke only
reads the driver's verdict and that driver reports none. That is the Ally X
class, reproduced in-house on demand: output that is wrong everywhere the
picture is looked at and clean everywhere the decoder is asked. Both NVIDIA
drivers reject the stream outright and name the cause themselves,
"Invalid PPS/SPS id in slice header (pps_id=119 / 115)" — the identical two
values, and the smoke leg dies at the identical AU 9, on a 4090 under 610.88
on Windows and on an RTX 5070 Ti under 610.43.03 on Linux. Same wrong values,
same access unit, two GPU generations, two operating systems: deterministic,
and therefore ours rather than any driver's.
It is not an ordering fault. Five of the divergent hashes appear nowhere in
the 250 goldens, so the pixels are wrong rather than correct-but-reordered.
Parity dies at frame 1 while smoke dies at AU 9 only because smoke holds four
frames before it looks; the first inter-predicted picture is already corrupt.
The legs are committed ahead of the fix deliberately. They are the regression
test for the defect, they are #[ignore]d so no CI leg changes colour, and the
evidence above is worth recording in the order it was obtained.
Adding a third and fourth copy of ~150 lines of unsafe Vulkan bring-up was
not acceptable, so it moved to tests/common. The two behavioural differences
between the callers are now named parameters rather than accidents: the parity
legs read back on a graphics queue and require one, while the smoke legs
accept a decode-only device and fall back to the decode family — which also
decides whether pool images are EXCLUSIVE or CONCURRENT, so it is load-bearing
rather than cosmetic. H.264 came through the refactor unchanged, verified two
ways: argument-by-argument against the previous file, and on hardware, still
250/250 bit-identical on NVIDIA Windows, AMD Windows and now NVIDIA Linux.
The loader is deliberately leaked at teardown. ash::Entry owns the Arc<Library>,
so dropping it unloads the Vulkan loader with every ICD and implicit layer;
harmless while each binary held one GPU leg, but each now holds two, and the
second would re-open a loader the first had torn down.
Three guards run without a GPU, because everything above is #[ignore]d: the
golden file's count and digest shape, the HEVC access-unit split agreeing with
what the CPU planner emits (with iraps == 1 pinning "no CRA anywhere", so a
re-synced vector that opens with one fails here rather than as a frame-count
mismatch on the fleet), the vector staying Main 4:2:0 8-bit since both legs
hard-code that probe, and a refusal to run the smoke legs with
PF_VKD_TEST_READBACK set, which would quietly grow the pool a usage flag
production never carries.