Files
hq/03-DESIGN
jschoubben e88b448145 The fix is real: 76x, verified. And how the lab installs on a clean machine
Snapshot 9.9s -> 0.13s. Restore 10.4s -> 0.80s. Three snapshots sharing
1.36 GB instead of costing 4.8 GB. The projected four-machine reset cycle
falls from ~90s, unbounded at worst, to ~15s dominated by a boot that
cannot be avoided. ADR 0029's inner-loop argument holds with copy-on-write
and did not without it.

The consistency matters as much as the speed: three consecutive snapshots
took 0.13, 0.12 and 0.13 seconds, against a dir second snapshot that never
finished.

One honest counter-observation recorded: launching onto the fresh
copy-on-write pool was slower, 20.2s against 14.3s, because the image had
to be unpacked into a pool that had never seen it. Paid once per pool, and
dwarfed by what snapshotting saves, but it went the other way.

Doing the measurement produced the answer to how the lab installs on a
clean machine, because both failure modes appeared while doing it.

Installed is not available: the daemon was present with units disabled and
no group. Issue 007.

Available is not adequate, and this is worse: with the storage tooling
absent everything worked and snapshots were seventy-six times slower.
Nothing failed, nothing warned. That is a variant the mesh has not
catalogued — 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.

So the lab verifies CAPABILITY, never installation, and refuses to run
degraded rather than warning — a warning about a slow inner loop is read
once and ignored forever. Prerequisites may arrive from a mesh module or
from the lab's own bootstrap, and the second path is required rather than
convenient: a lab installable only by a mesh cannot host the development
of the mesh that installs it.

The lab is the second thing installed by hand, after the node host, and for
the same reason: something has to be first, and pretending otherwise
produces a circularity papered over by a script nobody exercises.
2026-08-24 00:14:57 +02:00
..

03-DESIGN

The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.

Two layers

Folder What it is
00-as-is/ The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again.
01-to-be/ The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/.

They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.

When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs, the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is the expensive half.

Frontmatter

Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:

---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: []                 # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD      # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: []            # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---

For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.

Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.

Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.

What belongs here

Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/ and the research that produced it is closed.

Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.