- build: the rootless overlay mount only exists inside podman unshare's user namespace; run the vmlinuz check/copy and the find|cpio pipeline there, streaming cpio's stdout to the parent for gzipping (also drops the initrd.tmp round-trip and excludes vmlinuz from the archive) - build: unmount the image on all code paths, not just success - run: treat timeout's exit 124 as the expected smoke-test timeout and error on any other non-zero status (a missing qemu binary no longer reports success) Fixes bug-1, bug-2, bug-3 from the code review.