Beat VM create wall time without changing VM semantics.
Generate a work-seed ext4 sidecar during image builds and rootfs rebuilds, then clone and resize that seed for each new VM instead of rebuilding /root from scratch. Plumb the new seed artifact through config, runtime metadata, store state, runtime-bundle defaults, doctor checks, and default-image reconciliation so older images still fall back cleanly.
Add a daemon TAP pool to keep idle bridge-attached devices warm, expose stage timing in lifecycle logs, add a create/SSH benchmark script plus Make target, and teach verify.sh that tap-pool-* devices are reusable capacity rather than cleanup leaks.
Validated with go test ./..., make build, ./verify.sh, and make bench-create ARGS="--runs 2".
Multi-VM delete exposed two separate regressions: NAT teardown was still running after stopped VMs had already dropped their tap metadata, and the store was relying on one-off SQLite pragmas instead of configuring every pooled connection.
Skip NAT cleanup when the runtime no longer has the network handles needed to identify rules, and move the SQLite profile into the DSN so WAL, busy timeouts, foreign keys, and the other connection-scoped settings apply consistently across the pool. Keep the write mutex in place for concurrent mutations, and update the daemon/store tests to use valid image fixtures now that foreign key enforcement is real.
Validated with go test ./... and make build.
Dangerous lifecycle, store, system, and RPC paths still had little or no automated confidence, and the live smoke harness failed opaquely when guest boot timing drifted. This adds targeted unit coverage for store allocation and decode failures, system helper failure ordering and cleanup, RPC error handling, and daemon lookup/reconcile/editing/stats/preflight edge cases.
It also makes verify.sh wait for daemon-observable VM readiness before SSH, reuse a bounded boot deadline for the SSH phase, and dump VM metadata, logs, tap state, socket state, and NAT rules on timeout so host-level failures are diagnosable instead of surfacing only connection refused.
Validation: go test ./..., go test ./... -cover, bash -n verify.sh. No live ./verify.sh boot was run in this environment.
