Signals over IPC, one-shot timers, and the service harness (M17.4)

Signals are statements delivered as coalescing notifications to the
endpoint a process nominates with signal_bind — never a hijacked stack,
never a question (liveness is the zero-length ping the harness answers).
process_signal is supervisor-or-self gated, like kill; unbound targets
accumulate a pending mask delivered on bind. timer_bind is the missing
timed wait: a one-shot deadline landing in the same replyWait as
everything else — what stop(), hello deadlines, and restart backoff are
built from. runtime.service.run folds requests, signals, and
notifications into callbacks; the VFS conversion deletes its hand-rolled
loop and gains the whole lifecycle contract. The signals scenario drives
ping, reload, terminate->exited, the timer, and the deaf-child
deadline->killed path from ring 3. docs/process-lifecycle.md increments
1-4 are now as-built.

docs/ipc.md

@@ -103,3 +103,22 @@ This is what makes a user-space driver possible at all, and it's the subject of
   the oldest (discrete messages, not a coalescing level like the notification ring).
 - **A bounded reply.** `MSG_MAX` is 256 bytes and the copy runs under the big kernel
   lock; a bulk transfer wants shared pages, not a copy.
+
+## Lifecycle conventions over IPC (M17)
+
+Three conventions from [process-lifecycle.md](process-lifecycle.md) ride the
+notification mechanism:
+
+- **Signals** arrive as notifications on the endpoint a process nominated with
+  `signal_bind` (`runtime.process.bindSignals`): badge = the signal bit plus the
+  coalesced pending mask (`runtime.process.signalsFrom` decodes). Statements,
+  never questions; no payload, no reply.
+- **One-shot timers** (`timer_bind`, `runtime.system.timerOnce`) land as a
+  timer-bit notification — the timed wait: a service arms a deadline and keeps
+  serving, instead of blocking in sleep.
+- **The universal ping**: a **zero-length request is the liveness probe**,
+  answered with a zero-length reply by the service harness itself
+  (`runtime.service.run`). No protocol's requests start at length zero, so the
+  encoding cannot collide, and a wedged service simply fails to answer — which
+  is the diagnosis. Deep health ("can I reach my hardware?") stays a per-service
+  protocol message.