Release Notes: StateWarden 1.2.0

Release Date: July 13, 2026 Target Audience: Enterprise Administrators, SREs, and CISOs

StateWarden 1.2.0 represents our most comprehensive infrastructure update to date, introducing a completely native, agentless protection architecture for Proxmox VE environments. This release eradicates downtime penalties associated with Bare Metal and Virtual Machine recoveries by introducing a fully automated, Zero-Downtime Live Storage Migration pipeline.

Beyond core features, this update resolves critical edge cases spanning across the hypervisor telemetry layer, concurrency within the Windows COM subsystem, and extensive UX overhauls for enterprise fleet management.

🚀 Major Capabilities

Agentless Virtualization Protection (Proxmox VE)

StateWarden now natively protects Proxmox Virtual Machines directly from the hypervisor layer without requiring agent installation inside the guest OS.

• Image Fleecing & Application Consistency: The agent bypasses high-level hypervisor locks by communicating directly with the QEMU Machine Protocol (QMP) over UNIX sockets. It creates temporary QCOW2 overlays to achieve accurately frozen, application-consistent snapshots without pausing or stunning the active VM.
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT): Implemented native support for QEMU Dirty Bitmaps. The agent seamlessly exports active bitmaps to the deduplication engine, tracking exactly which blocks changed between intervals to guarantee ultra-fast, incremental backups.
• Side-by-Side Cloning: Administrators can now clone backed-up VMs directly to the hypervisor as new instances. StateWarden automatically mutates internal smbios1 UUIDs, hardware vmgenids, and randomizes all netX MAC addresses to guarantee that restored clones never cause Layer-2 network conflicts with original systems.

Zero-Downtime Live Storage Migration & Instant Boot

• Instant Boot Protocol: Virtual machines can now be booted directly from the deduplicated backup stream via Network Block Devices (NBD) in a matter of seconds, bridging the RTO gap to near-zero.
• Live Storage Migration: VMs instantiated via Instant Boot can be permanently migrated back to physical hypervisor storage (e.g., local-lvm) while the guest OS remains powered on and actively serving network traffic. The agent orchestrates an atomic blockdev-mirror job and executes a block-job-complete pivot, silently transferring all IO operations to the physical disk without a single dropped packet.
• Zero-Touch Mounting: Raw block mounting is fully automated. StateWarden dynamically parses hypervisor configurations to allocate NBD streams directly to the next available scsiX hardware controllers, entirely removing the need for manual CLI intervention.

🛡️ Edge-Case Hardening & Resiliency

High-Performance Ephemeral Storage Mitigations

• TOCTOU Race Condition Mitigated: Completely redesigned the NBD allocation pipeline with strict internal synchronization. Administrators can now mount dozens of high-throughput NBD streams side-by-side without block collisions or overwrites.
• Isolated COW Boundaries: Copy-On-Write layers and UNIX sockets are now strictly isolated per individual disk, preventing parallel disks originating from the same backup from corrupting each other's overlay states.
• Boot Subsystem Healing: Resolved Read-Only kernel panics during Instant Boot initialization by strictly forcing Write mode on the NBD kernel invocation. Furthermore, the agent intelligently prioritizes bootable controllers (scsi0, ide0, virtio0) when streaming a full system image.

Windows COM Lifecycle Isolation (Crash Loop Fix)

• The Problem: Rapid restarts of the Windows Agent by the update supervisor could trigger a fatal race condition during shutdown, because WMI queries were still being processed while the agent was terminating.
• The Fix: Windows COM initialization and WMI querying are now isolated from the agent's main processing, guaranteeing agent stability on Windows Server environments.

Hybrid Edge-Caching Smart-Poller

• Zero-Load Infrastructure Tracking: Replaced standard fixed-interval polling with a high-frequency Hybrid Smart-Poller. The agent now relies on BLAKE3 cryptographic hashing of raw Proxmox configuration files, pushing updates to the Control Plane instantly only when an actual hardware or state change is detected.

💻 Enterprise Interface & UX Refinements

Intelligent Asset Interaction

• Offline Asset Support: Dashboard telemetry has been entirely decoupled from hypervisor power states. Virtual machines that are powered off at the hypervisor level are now fully interactable in the UI, permitting administrators to schedule and execute crash-consistent backups without ever waking the guest OS.
• Ephemeral Asset Guardrails: Instant Boot VMs are tagged with a highly visible TEMPORARY indicator. A dedicated "Make Permanent" action banner seamlessly allows for single-click execution of the Live Storage Migration process.
• Hypervisor Locking: Critical operations now enforce native hypervisor resource locks (--lock clone) to prevent operators from inadvertently starting or modifying VMs from the native Proxmox UI while StateWarden is orchestrating underlying block layers.

Data Masking & Optimization

• Clean Topologies: Technical routing identifiers required by the Agent are now cleanly abstracted in the UI. This presents an executive-friendly interface without compromising backend routing.
• Driad Vault Exclusions: The central storage node (driad) has expanded its internal whitelists to securely capture and preserve raw hypervisor configurations (.conf), guaranteeing accurate 1:1 hardware parameter restorations.

Windows Desktop: Silent Boot Footprint

• The native Windows GUI application has been completely refactored for enterprise stealth. It now launches silently into the system tray on OS boot. Initial window creation and foreground focus algorithms are strictly deferred until the user intentionally clicks the tray icon, eliminating screen flashing and workflow interruptions.

⚙️ Component Versions

• Core Agent (sw): 1.2.0
• Windows GUI (windows-gui): 1.2.0
• StateWarden Launcher: 1.0.7
• Recovery ISO (sw-recovery-ui): 0.2.16