Make vm create wait for the guest-side vsock /healthz endpoint instead of only waiting for the host socket path, so the wait_vsock_agent stage reflects actual guest readiness.
Start banger-vsock-agent earlier in the Alpine OpenRC graph and report later /ports failures as guest-service waits rather than vsock-agent waits, which makes the progress output match what the guest is really doing.
Validate with go test ./..., a rebuilt managed alpine image, and a fresh vm create --image alpine --name alp --nat that now progresses through wait_vsock_agent -> wait_guest_ready -> wait_opencode -> ready.
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.
