IMC Hive Generator

make_imc_hive regenerates the Windows registry hive used to configure Petri test guests during image preparation.

Purpose

The checked-in IMC hive is applied to an offline Windows installation by prep_steps. It describes settings that must exist before the prepared test guest first boots, most importantly the Pipette service.

This is a generator for a repository artifact, not part of every VMM test run. Normal tests consume the already-generated hive.

Platform requirement

The implementation uses Windows offline-registry APIs and only runs on Windows. The workspace builds a stub on other platforms, but that stub exits with an unsupported-platform error.

Regenerating the hive

Run the generator from Windows and pass the output path as its single positional argument:

cargo run -p make_imc_hive -- petri\guest-bootstrap\imc.hiv

The tool removes an existing output file before saving the new hive.

Regenerate the hive when changing Pipette's service path, startup account, dependencies, isolation policy, or initial crash-dump configuration. Changes that can be made after Pipette connects usually belong in a Petri test instead.

How the hive is consumed

prep_steps embeds or resolves the generated hive and makes it available to the temporary utility guest. Windows applies the hive to the offline SYSTEM configuration on the target test disk. The prepared disk is then cached for later VMM tests.

Troubleshooting

An offline-registry error generally means the destination cannot be created or the platform APIs rejected a key operation. A later guest failure can indicate that the hive was valid structurally but contains an incorrect service path or startup dependency. Inspect the prepared guest's SYSTEM hive and Windows service logs in that case.