Berthly 1.2.0: kernel boot arguments, digest-verified kernels, and a round of daemon-startup fixes

Thirteen days after 1.1.0, Berthly 1.2.0 is out — catching up to apple/container 1.2.0 and clearing out a batch of daemon-startup rough edges found along the way.

New capability

Kernel boot arguments — a new “Kernel boot arguments” field on the Run/Create sheet’s Security tab wires up container 1.2.0’s --kernel-arg flag, for appending raw arguments to the kernel command line (enabling BPF LSM, for example) — previously only reachable from the CLI.
Kernel archive digest verification — the Set Kernel sheet’s Tar Archive section now has a Digest field, required for remote kernel URLs and prefilled by “Use Recommended,” matching upstream’s new requirement that a custom kernel URL ship with a paired sha256 digest.

Fixes worth calling out

A decode failure no longer wipes your whole config. container 1.2.0 tightened its kernel config format — a kernel.url set without a digest (the shape anyone using a custom kernel URL pre-1.2.0 already has) now fails to decode. Berthly used to treat any decode failure as “no config file,” silently resetting DNS settings, build defaults, and everything else in config.toml back to stock. It now surfaces the failure instead of eating it.
Cancelling a daemon start, install, or upgrade no longer shows a false “Connection Error.” The retry/verify sequence under the hood couldn’t previously tell “you hit Cancel” apart from “this actually failed” — hitting Cancel mid-upgrade landed you on an error screen instead of cleanly back where you started.
“Start Container System” shows real progress now, instead of a static “Starting…” for however long the launch, health-check, and machine-service verification actually take (can run well past a minute on an old daemon).
Run Container and Create Machine sheets stream progress logs during a first boot, instead of a bare spinner while a kernel or init image fetches in the background.
Starting a container from its own detail pane could still leave the list row stuck at half height — a second trigger for the bug documented here, fixed properly this time by making the list re-measure row heights after the section-move animation, rather than chasing the specific action that triggers it.

Getting it

Already on Berthly? Use Berthly → Check for Updates….
New to Berthly? Download Berthly-1.2.0.dmg, open it, and drag Berthly.app into Applications. It’s Developer ID–signed and notarized, so it opens without warnings.

Testing

This release shipped only after its gate run passed on the release commit: 506 unit tests (90% line coverage of the pure logic layer), 76 UI tests against a mock daemon, and 18 real-daemon end-to-end journeys.

Full details in the release notes.