Hatchling

Hatchling is the development and validation stage where the next Saphira generation is exercised. The hatchling repository stream carries packages being proven there before promotion. It is what the Egg hatched, and the stage that will hatch into Hatched.

These are related but not identical. Hatchling the stage is the work of building and testing the next generation. The hatchling stream is the repository view of the packages that have been proven there. The machine, the generation stage and the repository stream are different objects, and it is worth keeping them separate. The dragon is not the nest and the nest is not the sky.

The next generation, Saphira D with its systemd init, is built and tested here. The mechanism is concrete: Egg's buildpkg produces unsigned ready transactions, sign-apk-repo publishes them, and Hatchling, a disposable test virtual machine, consumes them through apk add and upgrade to verify install, boot and package ownership. Publication to the public repository happens only after Hatchling passes. The young dragon is handled often and kept warm, then tested in the wind.

Hatchling is a throw away Saphira system (8 vCPU, 16 GiB RAM). It is where init flavours (saphira-base-openrc and saphira-base-systemd), udev ownership splits and first boots are exercised, and it is destroyed and recreated freely. Egg is never sacrificed to this testing. The hatchling stream is where the proven packages surface, and the systemd unit pages show the concrete results:

• nginx.service
• php-fpm85.service

Saphira D is a musl and systemd sibling experiment: a test of whether the same Saphira philosophy survives a different init and service layer. The default Saphira design still uses OpenRC, and OpenRC need not lose for Saphira D to succeed, nor vice versa. Both share the same Saphira base and the same triple x86_64-saphira-linux-musl.

Hatchling is honest about failure, which is the point of a disposable system. Verified on this machine in late August 2026: it runs apk-tools 3.0.5 on Saphira Linux 0.1, installs and upgrades through apk as expected, and reports itself as an x86_64 Saphira host.

The systemd flavour earned its stripes here too. An early boot on the original kernel stalled for want of BPF cgroup support; the kernel gained CONFIG_CGROUP_BPF, and after that dbus and logind came up green alongside the rest of the service set. Those findings went straight into what became Hatched.

Egg to Hatchling to Hatched is one turn of the circle. Egg holds steady, Hatchling does the work and is discarded, Hatched remains. That pattern is how Saphira keeps provenance without picking up scars.

Hatchling follows Egg, and precedes Hatched. Continue to Hatched, or return to the package repository and the Egg it grew from.