The boot install check reads the mesh in one batch again

Every boot, each installed package is checked against the mesh: the install record lists the nodes the package wrote, and the sweep reads them back. The rule it follows is written into the code that does it — read the whole declared set in ONE batch, never one probe per path, because a probe for a path that may not be there is the shape that trips a storm breaker on the node's owning hub.

The rule was not what ran. Reads reach storage through a short stack of layers, and the batched read survives only if every layer passes it on. Two of them did not — they inherited a framework fallback that quietly turns a batch back into one probe per path — so for every batched read in the platform, a backend that really can read a hundred paths in one query was never asked to.

The interesting part is not the extra round-trips; it is that the two reads do not fail the same way. A single-path read against Postgres treats a partition whose table was never created as an answer: no node here. The batched read treats it as what it is: this store could not be read. Under the fallback, therefore, "storage is not there" and "the node is gone" arrived as the same answer — and the sweep turned it into an error naming perfectly healthy nodes as ABSENT, on every boot, for a package that was fine. Nodes under a Source/ or Test/ path are stored separately from their siblings, so they could meet this on their own while the other two hundred nodes of the same package read back normally.

Every layer now forwards the batch, and the layer that does the work walks the stores in order: the first store that holds a path serves it, and each next store is asked only for what is still unanswered. A store that cannot answer now faults instead of shrugging, and the sweep reports the honest verdict — the mesh could not be read, so completeness was not checked, and this is not a pass — rather than a list of missing nodes that are not missing. A new check holds every layer to the forward, so the next one added cannot quietly drop it again.