Part 3 in the Horcrux dev log series.
Backdated, written in November 2026 from git and CI records. Part 2 stopped at an unfinished ISO on December 31, 2025.
I came back on September 24, 2026 with two goals: get CI to really run, and build Horcrux the Gentoo way.
The Gentoo goal came from a mistake. At some point the Dockerfile had turned into standard Rust boilerplate: FROM rust, cargo build, FROM debian-slim. It had drifted into boilerplate that ignored what the project is for. I fixed it on September 24 and wrote a rule into the repo notes so it can’t come back. The rule in the repo notes reads:
A Dockerfile doing FROM rust:* -> cargo build -> FROM debian:*-slim
is wrong. It is a regression. Fixed once already on 2026-09-24.Now the Dockerfile builds through real Portage against the project’s own ebuild, and the ebuild is the canonical install path.
The numbers
Pulled from the Forgejo API, September 24 to 30:
workflow runs: 121
success 12
failure 92
cancelled 11
skipped 6
ci.yml: 8 success, 71 failure
docs.yml: 4 success, 19 failure88 commits that week, a lot of them fixes for whatever the last run complained about.
What kept breaking
The ebuild first. It depended on virtual/rust, which doesn’t exist (the package is dev-lang/rust), so emerge said “there are no ebuilds to satisfy”. dev-util/trunk doesn’t exist either, so the UI bundler gets installed with cargo during the build. qemu’s REQUIRED_USE says vte? ( gtk ) and I’d enabled vte alone. The Xen tools ebuild in that Gentoo snapshot died in src_prepare on an unset version variable; Horcrux only does KVM, so I dropped the Xen flag instead of fighting it. A pile of qemu and spice USE flags dead-ended in a masked libglvnd, and a headless VM host has no use for audio or GL anyway.
Then the runners. Actions that weren’t mirrored on the registry my Forgejo uses. upload-artifact v4 not supported (“GHESNotSupportedError”). A runner with a full disk. A clippy step killed by the runner. A 30 minute ephemeral timeout that killed legitimate Gentoo builds. A full emerge that hit a 3 hour limit until I gave the CI image light USE flags. Several commit messages just say “retrigger” because the last failure was the infrastructure and not the code.
Fake stuff that came out
Real tests started finding placeholders. The login form wasn’t wired to the auth API. Disk usage in the metrics was a hardcoded 65%; it now reads statvfs. The Kubernetes join code accepted a made-up CA cert hash and now refuses it. HA fencing for IPMI, iLO, iDRAC and SNMP PDUs, parallel volume restore and live-migration pre-flight checks were stubs and got real code on the 30th. I don’t know yet how any of that behaves on actual hardware. release.yml only built x86_64 although the README claimed three architectures, so it now cross-compiles aarch64 and riscv64.
On the 25th and 26th the API integration suite reached 22 of 22. It’s the first green test run I can find in the history.
State
The Gentoo build works in CI with trimmed USE flags, the tests run, and about one run in ten was green. The README still overpromised, and I rewrote its status line on October 21 (part 5).
Design decisions
Gentoo first. My reason is freedom to choose. USE flags are the main part: they let an installer choose which virtualization backends, container runtimes and NAS protocols get compiled in, and the repo notes call that the main advantage over Proxmox. Compiling for specific hardware is the secondary reason. For background, I was a Debian developer from 1999 to 2006 and I’ve used Gentoo since. I’m blunt about it in the repo notes: generic Debian or Ubuntu conventions are the wrong default here.
Dropping Xen. The commit says Horcrux is a headless KVM-only VM host and has no need for Xen guest support. The same reasoning removed audio and GL from qemu: no local display on a headless host.
Architectures: amd64, arm64 and riscv64. The README dropped ppc64le the same day as out of scope. That’s my call, and I don’t have the reason written down. The riscv64 notes do say it needs real hardware for validation.
Light USE flags in CI: the full emerge hit a 3 hour limit, so the CI smoke-test image builds with fewer flags. A speed trade, and it means CI doesn’t build the full-feature package.
Other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. The series continues with the latest Horcrux dev log post.
