Prevent partial VM startup failures from leaking loop devices and dm state on the host.
Move root snapshot setup into a rollback-safe helper that records loop and mapper handles incrementally, tears them down in reverse order on failure, and reuses the same dm/loop cleanup path during normal runtime teardown. Also switch the daemon runner field to a small command-runner interface so the snapshot path can be tested with injected failures.
Add failure-injection coverage for losetup, blockdev, dmsetup, partial teardown, and joined rollback errors. Validated with go test ./... and make build.
Fix the Go control plane NAT path now that runtime state lives in the daemon instead of the old repo-local vm.json files.
Add a daemon-native NAT helper that derives uplink, guest IP, and TAP rules directly from VMRecord, applies the existing iptables/sysctl behavior idempotently, and removes the broken nat.sh handoff from vm.go.
Cover uplink parsing and rule generation with unit tests. Validated with go test ./... and make build; a live verify.sh --nat run installed host rules but stopped on the same guest SSH-readiness issue seen in the plain smoke test on this host.
Replace the daemon's hand-rolled Firecracker process/socket client with the official firecracker-go-sdk while keeping the existing VM lifecycle and host-side disk and TAP setup intact.
Build machine configs through the SDK, launch Firecracker through a sudo process runner, resolve the real VM PID after startup, and use the SDK client for Ctrl-Alt-Del instead of raw REST calls. Drop the unused cached Firecracker state and add focused adapter tests for config and process-runner wiring.
Validated with go mod tidy, go test ./..., and make build. A live KVM/Firecracker smoke boot was not run in this environment.
Replace the shell-only user workflow with `banger` and `bangerd`: Cobra commands, XDG/SQLite-backed state, managed VM and image lifecycle, and a Bubble Tea TUI for browsing and operating VMs.\n\nKeep Firecracker orchestration behind the daemon so VM specs become persistent objects, and add repo entrypoints for building, installing, and documenting the new flow while still delegating rootfs customization to the existing shell tooling.\n\nHarden the control plane around real usage by reclaiming Firecracker API sockets for the user, restarting stale daemons after rebuilds, and returning the correct `vm.create` payload so the CLI and TUI creation flow work reliably.\n\nValidation: `go test ./...`, `make build`, and a host-side smoke test with `./banger vm create --name codex-smoke`.
