jschoubben
98bcd5cc49
The lifecycle design closed on a question that was measurable rather than arguable, so it was measured. One virtual machine on a workstation with hardware virtualisation and NVMe. Raising: the launch call returns in 3.4s, the machine is actually usable after 14.3s. The gap is a design constraint — raise must wait for the second number, because reporting the first would be transport reported as effect, which is the mesh's own recurring failure. Snapshot: 9.9s and 1.6 GB for a 1.5 GB instance. A dir snapshot is a full copy; nothing is shared. Restore: 10.4s, usable again after 20.1s. The second snapshot exceeded two minutes and never completed. That is the more troubling number: snapshot cost here is not merely high, it is unpredictable, and a loop with a variable multi-minute step is one nobody trusts. Projected to a four-machine scenario, a reset-and-rerun cycle is about a minute and a half at best and unbounded at worst, before any of the mesh's own work begins. That is too slow for an inner loop, and ADR 0029's whole argument — that making the bootstrap path the inner loop turns the least-exercised code into the most-exercised — holds only while resetting is cheap. The cause is not virtual machines. Hardware virtualisation is present and machines boot in fourteen seconds. It is that the daemon offers exactly one storage driver, dir, which has no copy-on-write and therefore no cheap snapshot. The btrfs kernel module is available; btrfs-progs is simply not installed, which is the entire reason the driver is absent. The copy-on-write comparison was deliberately NOT run, because running it would mean installing a package by hand — which the rules forbid and which would have made the measurement unreproducible. So the honest statement is that the current configuration is too slow and the likely fix is known but unverified, rather than that btrfs fixes it.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.