Sometimes the knote comes early

Not being a native speaker, I thought it was some pun on "knot" or something, but I guess it's simply the internal name used for kernel-side notifications which seems to be a mechanism to have the kernel support the various event libraries better.

See the OP's commit [1], it clearly uses the word in function calls etc in the code. See also [2] for relevant man knote(9) page.

[1]: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/26eeb0be5e3709df77142e...

[2]: https://man.openbsd.org/knote.9