Phase 8 C (1/n): QEMU harness now preserves NVRAM across runs

Scoping Phase C (the MINT word) surfaced a real blocker: "mint one
Zuse, ever" needs the cert to survive reboots, but the qemu target
copied a fresh, pristine OVMF_VARS.fd on every invocation -- a
UEFI-NVRAM-based cert would never persist under this project's own
normal test workflow. Digging further, aarch64 had no persistent NVRAM
store at all (single -bios arg, no split VARS pflash like amd64/riscv64).

Fixed rather than switching storage substrates: amd64/riscv64 now only
copy the VARS template if the destination doesn't already exist, so
`clean` (which deletes the whole build tree) is the bleach step and a
bare `make qemu` preserves NVRAM -- matching the existing "always clean
before qemu" acceptance convention exactly. aarch64 restructured to
split CODE(ro)/VARS(rw) pflash drives matching the other two, with a
graceful fallback to the old -bios mode on hosts without split firmware.

Also resolves two design questions before any cert code: Zuse doesn't
need Milestone 6's CA (that's the capsule-signing chain, a separate
trust domain -- Zuse is a self-sovereign instance-local root of trust),
and flags that this session's own earlier vm_zuse_cert_install() storage
(16 bytes) is too small for a real Ed25519 keypair.

Verified: all three architectures boot clean to ok> with the new pflash
arrangement, Stadium conservation intact, no panics or guest errors.
Infrastructure-only -- no cert code yet. Documented in FABRIC-3.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U14ET9CWAtbQMbYqomKgXd
This commit is contained in:
Robert Allan James
2026-08-26 15:18:15 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Sonnet 5
parent 53e6c5709f
commit f223a31cec
7 changed files with 27186 additions and 4 deletions
File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff
File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff
File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff