VM create and vm set accepted zero or negative CPU and memory values, which either got stored directly or silently fell back to defaults and only surfaced as failures later. This tightens validation so bad settings are rejected at the user boundary and again in the daemon before any VM record is persisted.
Change vm.create CPU and memory request fields to optional pointers so omitted values still mean defaults, while explicit non-positive values can be distinguished and rejected. Update Cobra create/set parsing, keep the TUI aligned with the new API shape, and add regression tests for CLI parsing, daemon-side validation, and the create-defaults path.
Validation: go test ./... and make build. Left my-rootfs.ext4 untracked.
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.
