The tier system was documented, operator-authorable, and inert. Deleted rather than activated,
because its premise is gone rather than merely unused.
"Tier C" meant a driver running out-of-process behind an IDriverSupervisor that could restart its
Host without tearing down the OPC UA session. No such process exists anywhere: Galaxy reaches
MXAccess over gRPC to the external mxaccessgw sidecar (PR 7.2 retired the in-process
Galaxy.Host/Proxy/Shared projects) and FOCAS has run in-process since its managed wire client
landed 2026-04-24. Consistently, IDriverSupervisor had ZERO implementations and there was nothing
for one to implement against.
The issue understated the inertness. It says the Tier-C-only protections never engaged, implying
the Tier A/B parts did. They did not: nothing constructs MemoryTracking, MemoryRecycle or
ScheduledRecycleScheduler outside their own unit tests, so the whole Core/Stability recycle layer
was dead — meaning option (a), "pass real tiers", was never a flag flip. It would have meant
writing the wiring that never existed AND arming it.
Deleted: MemoryTracking, MemoryRecycle, ScheduledRecycleScheduler, IDriverSupervisor, the
vestigial DriverTypeRegistry (referenced only by its own tests), and the RecycleIntervalSeconds
knob — which the AdminUI let an operator author and the parser validated while it configured
nothing.
DriverTier itself SURVIVES and is load-bearing: DriverResilienceOptions.GetTierDefaults supplies
the real per-capability timeout/retry/breaker policies via DriverFactoryRegistry.GetTier and
DriverCapabilityInvokerFactory. Only the isolation-and-recycle layer above it is gone.
Deliberately NOT deleted:
- WedgeDetector came along in the same directory and is equally dead in production, but it is
tier-agnostic and is not recycle machinery — it only shares the folder. Restored rather than
swept up in a decision that was not about it.
- IDriver.GetMemoryFootprint() and FlushOptionalCachesAsync() lose their only consumer here.
Removing them touches all 12 drivers and every test stub, so they are documented as
consumerless and filed as #525 instead of buried in this diff.
Compatibility: a deployed ResilienceConfig blob still carrying "recycleIntervalSeconds" parses
cleanly (unknown keys are ignored — guarded by a new test, because a blob that suddenly failed to
parse would fall back to tier defaults and silently discard the operator's real overrides), and
the AdminUI's preserve-unknown-keys bag keeps the key rather than rewriting stored config on an
unrelated edit.
The 01/U-6 knob-inertness guard carried an explicit carve-out admitting RecycleIntervalSeconds was
dormant and out of scope; that carve-out is now gone, so the expected set is literally what the
test's name claims.
Note: Host.IntegrationTests has 2 failures (DriverProbeRegistrationTests.is_idempotent,
PrimaryGateFailoverTests) — verified pre-existing by reproducing both on clean master dc9d947b.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015p7wGqy3YpZNCpDzTpGMKo
Joseph Doherty
cbb882293b