The golden image logs in with agetty+startx and has no RGB controllers,
no NVIDIA card and no sound card, so the night-lockdown scripts — which
mask/stop lightdm.service and getty@.service and shell out to openrgb,
nvidia-smi and amixer — had nothing real to act on in a sandbox and
were being "verified" on the host instead.
- `vm lightdm <name>`: installs lightdm + lightdm-gtk-greeter into the
live overlay (pacman -Syu, not -S: the overlay's package database is
the image's and mirrors have rotated those versions out), configures
autologin -> i3 exactly like the host, turns tty1 back into a plain
getty, reboots the guest and proves lightdm.service is active with an
Xorg it owns. Never rebuilds the base: `vm build --force` re-seals a
new checksum while every existing sandbox still backs onto the old
file's name, which is silent qcow2 corruption.
- `vm shim <name> <tool> [exit[:N]|hang|sleep:S]`: a fake tool ahead of
the real one on PATH, every call logged with an epoch to
/var/log/vmbox-shim/<tool>.log so the host can assert what ran and in
what order. `hang` is the openrgb 1.0-2 that never returned on
2026-09-12 and defeated the curfew.
- The DISPLAY/XAUTHORITY resolver `vm run` sources becomes its own file,
guest/vmbox-x11.sh, installed by the image build and re-installed by
the lightdm switch; it now tests readability, not existence, and tries
~/.Xauthority before the startx serverauth glob, because lightdm's
Xorg -auth file is root-only.
- README: the worked example uses MIDNIGHT_SHUTDOWN_CONFIRM=y (the
installer refuses to run unattended now; `echo y |` no longer works),
and the "i2c RGB stays on the host" line is gone.
- bats: four host-side tests for shim.sh (exit, exit:N, hang, refusals).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mLnUeoJ3mUwGRTowTUH6d
`vm run` took 41s cold / 30s warm to run `true`. Both were vmbox waiting on
itself. Now 12s / 0s, with all five shutdown verdicts re-tested unchanged.
- _run_settle waited up to 30s for the kernel's "reboot: Power down" marker
UNCONDITIONALLY, including on the majority of runs that leave the guest up,
where that marker is never going to appear. It now settles only when the
guest has actually stopped, or when ssh returned 255 (what a successful
poweroff looks like from the host).
- The ssh readiness polls used a 5s ConnectTimeout. QEMU's user-mode
networking ACCEPTS the forwarded connection while the guest still has
nothing on :22, so each probe blocked for the full timeout instead of
failing fast: a guest reachable at ~10s was reported up at ~45s. Fixed in
both the sandbox and build paths, via an env override -- ssh honours the
FIRST value for an option, so a second -o could not have worked.
Making runs fast exposed a race: sshd now answers BEFORE tty1's autologin has
started Xorg, so the X environment could be missing on the first run after a
boot. `VMBOX_X_WAIT=<seconds>` waits for the session; it defaults to 0 so an
ordinary run never pays for a graphical session it is not using.
Build: the host's /var/cache/pacman/pkg is offered to the build guest
read-only (`readonly=on` AND an `ro` mount, because it is the real host cache)
as an extra CacheDir after the guest's own writable one, so a package the host
lacks still downloads rather than failing the build. This removes the 396 MiB
the build used to fetch. Host cache verified byte-for-byte identical across
four builds: same file count, same size, same mtime.
Build time itself moved only 103.8s -> 100.3s. Per-phase timings (also added
here) show why: 47s of it is the build guest's cloud-init first boot, and that
is NOT datasource probing -- `cloud-init analyze blame` totals 2.27s. Left
unexplained rather than guessed at; SESSION_RESULTS.md records the evidence.
Also: `vm scp`, which lib/ssh.sh could always do but the CLI never exposed,
and provision.sh split at the 250-line cap.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VdyMBGCrGVGDWtJ9xe48f3
