01 - Reference acceptance substrate

Status: Reference acceptance-suite material. This page describes a generic lab fixture retained for portable validation ideas. It is not the current public runtime architecture for agent-vm.sabe.dev.

The current public case study is centered on an OpenShell sandbox running a Hermes Agent workload, rootless Podman runtime posture, a managed provider boundary, a NUC-class VM substrate, and public evidence receipts. This page preserves an older/generic acceptance substrate that can still be useful for validating isolation concepts in a fictional lab.

What this page is for

Use this page when you want to understand the reference acceptance suite under platform/:

a fictional lab VM named agent-platform;
signed or digest-pinned artifact examples;
reconcile/align checks that compare declared state to running state;
a higher-risk job fixture that demonstrates microVM-style default-deny egress and teardown checks.

Do not read it as live topology, current private deployment state, or proof that the current public case study uses this exact runtime layout.

Reference fixture shape

flowchart TB
    subgraph LAB["fictional lab host"]
        SRC["source @ exact SHA"] --> PIPE["build · sign · print digest"]
    end
    subgraph VM["reference VM · agent-platform"]
        direction TB
        MAN["digest-pinned manifest"] --> REC["reconcile"]
        REC --> RUN["reference long-running service"]
        RUN --> ALN{"alignment check"}
        ALN -->|ALIGNED| OK["host-validated fixture"]
        ALN -->|DRIFT| HALT["flag drift"]
        JOB["higher-risk jobspec"] --> MVM["microVM-style sandbox<br/>default-deny egress"]
        MVM --> TDN["timeout<br/>teardown check"]
    end
    PIPE --> MAN
    RUN -.->|"escalate higher-risk work"| JOB

Solid arrows describe the reference acceptance path. Dotted arrows describe escalation from a long-running fixture into a stronger isolation fixture.

Reference checks

Check	Purpose	Current public meaning
Digest-pinned manifest	Prove declared artifact identity is explicit.	Useful supply-chain pattern, not current live deployment evidence.
Reconcile/align	Compare running state against declared state.	Useful state-as-truth pattern, not a claim about private topology.
MicroVM-style job	Exercise stronger isolation for higher-risk work.	Reference acceptance fixture; current public receipts lead with OpenShell sandbox and provider-boundary measurements.
Default-deny egress	Verify denied outbound attempts in the fixture.	Same control objective as the current case study, but separate evidence.
Teardown check	Confirm no residual fixture runtime remains after the job.	Reference-lab hygiene check, not production readiness.

Commands

These commands are host-dependent lab commands. They are expected to fail on ordinary laptops or CI without the required virtualization stack. They are not needed to read or validate the public static site.

platform/vm/provision-vm
platform/validate/nested-smoke
platform/validate/acceptance

Inside the fictional lab VM, the reference suite uses:

platform/images/build-sign-push <version>
platform/control/reconcile platform/manifests/hello.service.yaml
platform/control/align platform/manifests/hello.service.yaml
platform/sandbox/sandbox-runner platform/sandbox/jobspec.example.json

Non-claims

This page does not claim:

that the public site exposes live deployment topology;
that the current Agent VM case study uses this exact lab fixture;
that every outer containment boundary is measured;
that production readiness exists for a real workload;
that any private credential, token, host, VM, registry, or incident detail is present.

For the current public evidence trail, start with ../evidence/boundary-receipt-01-inner-sandbox.html and ../evidence/boundary-receipt-02-inference-boundary.html.