Glossary
The vocabulary, in one place.
Tenura introduces some terms that don't have direct analogs in container or VM infrastructure. Here are the ones you'll see most often, with pointers to deeper reading.
- Audit anchor 32-byte head pointer of the audit chain.
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A SHA-256 hash that points to the most recent record in a process's audit chain. Persisted on the daemon's narrow durable surface so the chain survives restarts. Knowing the anchor is enough to validate every prior record.
See: /security
- Audit chain A hash-linked log of lease lifecycle events.
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Each AuditRecord includes the previous record's hash and is sealed with SHA-256. Tampering with one record breaks linkage at ingest. The same artifact powers metering and compliance.
See: /security, /economics
- Capability token A short-lived, audience-bound authorization to access a resource.
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Signed by the fabric CA, scoped to a specific holder, node, lease, and epoch. TTL of 300 seconds or less. Long-lived secrets are not the unit of access in Tenura.
See: /security
- Capacity-second The native billing unit: one unit of capacity held for one second.
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A GPU held for two minutes is 120 GPU-seconds. 80 GiB of memory held for an hour is 288,000 GiB-seconds. Cost = capacity × duration_seconds × rate.
See: /pricing, /economics
- Cell A scheduling and trust boundary, usually region-scoped.
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A cell has its own scheduler, fabric CA, and pool of nodes. Leases are bound to the cell that issued them. Multi-cell deployments coordinate via the orchestrator.
- fabricBIOS The firmware boundary that mints and revokes capabilities.
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A minimal firmware specification for disaggregated computing fabrics. Implements the lease state machine, capability minting, replay protection, and the FENCED state. The wire protocol is open.
See: /architecture
- FENCED state A resource is quarantined; no new lease lands on it.
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Entered when teardown fails on lease expiry or revocation. Cleanup is enforcement, not hope: an operator must explicitly clear the fence (after diagnostic and remediation) before the resource is eligible for new leases.
See: /security
- grafOS The runtime that programs the fabric.
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A graph-based resource runtime: programs declare resource intent (GPU + memory + storage + network) by shape, the runtime acquires leases via fabricBIOS, and the program runs against the resulting handles.
See: /architecture
- Lease A cryptographic, time-bounded grant of resource access.
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Every resource access in Tenura is a lease. Leases have a TTL, a mandatory teardown path, and an audit-chain trail. When the TTL elapses, the resource is reclaimed automatically.
- Lease TTL How long a lease remains valid without renewal.
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Lease TTLs default to short windows (seconds to minutes) and can be extended by explicit renewal. Capability tokens have their own TTL upper-bounded by 300 seconds, even if the parent lease is longer.
- mTLS Mutual TLS authentication on the control plane.
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Both the client and the daemon present certificates signed by the fabric CA. There is no plaintext mode. Required for every control-plane interaction.
See: /security
- Preemption Revoking a lower-priority lease to admit a higher-priority one.
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When a Guaranteed-priority request arrives and capacity is insufficient, the scheduler identifies victims at strictly lower priority (Standard, then Scavenger) and revokes their leases. Every preemption generates an audit-chain event.
See: /economics
- Priority tier Guaranteed, Standard, or Scavenger.
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Guaranteed leases are never preempted. Standard leases are preempted by Guaranteed requests under contention. Scavenger leases are preempted by anyone — designed for fault-tolerant batch work that monetizes otherwise-idle capacity.
See: /pricing
- Quota A per-tenant cap on lease capacity.
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Three flavors: hard (reject when exceeded), soft (track but allow), burst (temporary over-quota with TTL). Per-tenant, per-resource, per-cell.
See: /economics
- Standard tier The middle priority tier (renamed from BestEffort).
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Preemptible by Guaranteed requests under contention. Discounted compared to Guaranteed. The default tier for non-latency-sensitive workloads.
- Tenant A unit of authorization, quota, and billing.
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Tenants own quotas, hold leases, and receive bills. Each tenant has a CA-issued certificate and an accounting tag that flows through every lease event.