jschoubben
77f3a4cea7
Every remaining cluster merged. Each was one design that had been split across
several records because it was worked out over days rather than at once.
the node host 8 -> 1 applies not decides, depends on nothing,
per operating system, root service, the
launcher, episodic, what a declaration is,
actions from the bundle only
a node and how it joins 4 -> 1 what a node is, joining, the link as
security boundary, the enrolment token
modules and the graph 7 -> 1 everything is a module, no domain modules,
three edges, provisioning, the core library
substrate and control 6 -> 1 the test, seven contexts, one control plane,
plane the authority is not a database, the named
products, the pinned bundle
connectivity 3 -> 1 a route is a grant, reachability declared,
filter rules
delivery 5 -> 1 reconciliation not a pipeline, artifacts,
the three silos, a failed step, the verdict
the lab 5 -> 1 (earlier)
how this repository 10 -> 1 (earlier)
works
Nothing was dropped. Each consolidated record carries the reasoning of the ones
it absorbs -- the measurements, the incidents, the alternatives rejected --
because that reasoning is the only reason to keep a record at all. What is gone
is the fragmentation: eight files to read to understand tier 0, when tier 0 is
one component.
The four superseded records went too. They existed to point at their
successors, and the successors now contain what they said.
The checker made this safe. Each merge left dangling links -- 38 files after
the host merge alone -- and it named every one. Nothing was found by reading,
and a manual pass would certainly have missed some, including references inside
AGENTS.md which every session loads.
6.2 KiB
layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| to-be | designed |
|
2026-08-24 |
|
Installing the lab on a clean machine
The lab has prerequisites — a virtualisation daemon, copy-on-write storage, a pool, an identity permitted to talk to it — and it cannot get them from the mesh, because it is where the mesh is built (ADR 0016).
So the lab needs an install path of its own. This describes it, and the shape it has to take is determined by two failures observed while measuring (research 010).
The two failures that shape this
One: installed is not available. The virtualisation package was present and explicitly
installed. Both its units were disabled, the operator was in no group, and the client reported
the server unreachable. Nothing had failed — the declaration was satisfied exactly as written
(04-ISSUES/007).
Two, and worse: available is not adequate. With the storage tooling absent, the daemon offered one driver, everything worked, and snapshots took seventy-six times longer than they needed to. Nothing failed. Nothing warned. A lab in that state runs correctly and is simply too slow to use — and the inner loop it exists to provide quietly does not exist.
The second is the more dangerous shape and it is a variant the mesh has not catalogued before. Its usual failure is reported success and did nothing. This is reported success and did it seventy-six times slower, which no error surface catches because nothing is wrong.
What follows: the lab verifies capability, never installation
The install path may differ. The verification does not.
Before the lab will raise anything, it asserts the outcomes it needs — not that packages are present, but that the machine can actually do the work:
| Assertion | Failing means |
|---|---|
| the daemon answers as the invoking user, not as root | a group membership that was granted but never took effect |
| a copy-on-write storage driver is offered | the userspace tooling is missing; snapshots will be full copies |
| the pool the lab will use is on that driver | a pool exists, and is the slow kind — the failure that has no symptom |
| hardware virtualisation is present | machines will be emulated and unusably slow |
| an image can be fetched or is cached | the first raise will fail late instead of early |
Each check states why it matters, in the terms of what it costs. "The pool uses the dir
driver" means nothing to someone who does not already know it means seventy-six times slower
and unbounded at worst.
The lab refuses to run degraded. It does not warn and continue: a warning about a slow inner loop is read once and ignored forever, and the loop stays slow. This is ADR 0058 applied where the failure is performance rather than an error.
Two ways the prerequisites arrive
On a machine the mesh manages — a module declares them, and a hook turns them into capabilities: the units enabled, the group granted, the pool created on the right driver. This already works; it is what was done for the virtualisation daemon itself.
On a machine the mesh does not manage — the lab's own bootstrap does it. One command, on a clean machine, that installs what is missing and configures it.
The second path is not a convenience. It is required, because the lab must work before the mesh does, and a lab that could only be installed by a mesh would be unable to host the development of the mesh that installs it.
Both paths end at the same verification. Whoever satisfied the prerequisites, the lab checks them itself — because the lesson of the first failure is precisely that something else said it was done is not evidence.
The lab is the second thing installed by hand
Worth stating, because it looks like an exception and is not.
The node host is the one thing installed by hand on a machine (research 006): everything else arrives through it. The lab is the same shape on a workstation — installed once, by hand, and then everything about the mesh is developed inside it.
Two bootstraps, at two levels, for the same reason: something has to be first, and pretending otherwise produces a circularity that gets papered over with a script nobody exercises.
What a clean install actually needs
In order, on a machine with nothing:
- A virtualisation daemon, running, with its socket enabled.
- Copy-on-write storage tooling — the kernel side is usually already present; it is the userspace half that is missing and that decides whether the driver is offered at all.
- A pool on that driver. A loop-backed file is sufficient and needs no partitioning, which matters: requiring a dedicated filesystem would make the lab uninstallable on a machine already in use.
- Group membership for the operator — which does not apply to sessions that already existed. Observed directly: a shell whose process tree predated the grant could not reach the daemon while a fresh lookup showed the membership present. The bootstrap has to say so, or the first thing a person meets is a permission error that looks like a broken install.
- Verification, as above, before anything is raised.
Open
- Whether the lab's bootstrap may install packages at all, given that the mesh's rules forbid installing by hand. The resolution is probably that the lab's bootstrap is the sanctioned mechanism on an unmanaged machine, in the way the mesh's own first-node script is — but that is an argument to record, not to assume.
- What "adequate" means numerically. The checks above are qualitative. A snapshot-time threshold would catch a copy-on-write pool that is slow for some other reason, and would be a real assertion rather than a proxy.
- Whether the lab should own its pool rather than using an existing one. Owning it makes the driver guaranteed; sharing it avoids duplicating storage on a machine that already has a pool.