Hard-cut banger away from source-checkout runtime bundles as an implicit source of\nimage and host defaults. Managed images now own their full boot set,\nimage build starts from an existing registered image, and daemon startup\nno longer synthesizes a default image from host paths.\n\nResolve Firecracker from PATH or firecracker_bin, make SSH keys config-owned\nwith an auto-managed XDG default, replace the external name generator and\npackage manifests with Go code, and keep the vsock helper as a companion\nbinary instead of a user-managed runtime asset.\n\nUpdate the manual scripts, web/CLI forms, config surface, and docs around\nthe new build/manual flow and explicit image registration semantics.\n\nValidation: GOCACHE=/tmp/banger-gocache go test ./..., bash -n scripts/*.sh,\nand make build.
Stop relying on ad hoc rootfs handling by adding image promotion, managed work-seed fingerprint metadata, and lazy self-healing for older managed images after the first create.
Rebuild guest images with baked SSH access, a guest NIC bootstrap, and default opencode services, and add the staged Void kernel/initramfs/modules workflow so void-exp uses a matching Void boot stack.
Replace the opaque blocking vm.create RPC with a begin/status flow that prints live stages in the CLI while still waiting for vsock health and opencode on guest port 4096.
Validate with GOCACHE=/tmp/banger-gocache go test ./... and live void-exp create/delete smoke runs.
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.
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`.
