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M6 Qualification

M6 — Systems programming is complete and CI-qualified at the course/Q1 level.

Scope

M6 covers the bilingual core lessons 14–19:

  • pointers, buffers and structs;
  • volatile, interrupts and atomicity;
  • SRAM and stack resource budgeting;
  • optimization and generated-code analysis;
  • code-size and static-SRAM analysis;
  • integrated systems capstone.

The executable material uses paired C and hand-written AVR Assembly where runtime behavior is being taught. The capstone integrates Timer0, ADC, EEPROM and USART.

Qualification gate

The authoritative M6 exit gate is:

sh tools/check_m6.sh

The gate combines a clean build/disassembly/size pass, the complete Q1 simulator suite, resource regression guardrails, the dedicated capstone Q1 probe and generation of the memory report.

M6 was first accepted as CI-qualified by GitHub Actions run 524. Later repository builds continue to exercise the same qualification infrastructure.

Q1 evidence

M6 Q1 evidence includes deterministic paired C/Assembly checks for data structures, shared ISR/main state, stack/resource behavior, optimization behavior and the integrated capstone. The capstone verifies modeled Timer/ADC/EEPROM/USART integration in simavr.

The resource policy uses course regression guardrails rather than universal ATmega1284P device limits. Static SRAM is measured from ELF data; dynamic stack behavior is qualified separately by runtime probes and must not be inferred solely from static section sizes.

Boundary

This qualification is Q1 simulator qualification. It does not establish electrical or physical behavior of EduBoard-AVR/STK500, analog accuracy, oscillator accuracy, signal integrity, programming hardware, external devices or other Q2 properties.

Board-specific Q2 evidence remains separate and must be based on a stable physical EduBoard revision.

Result

M6: PASS — course/Q1 level.

The executable tests and CI result are authoritative; this document records the scope and interpretation of that evidence.