The separate smoke-vm job with `needs: build-iso` required round-tripping
the 1.5 GB ISO through actions/upload-artifact + download-artifact. v3
on Forgejo has a known issue where large artifacts stall at 0.0% in the
download step — the smoke run hung today with endless "Total file count:
1 ---- Processed file #0 (0.0%)" output.
Since both jobs run on the same self-hosted runner (host mode, same
workspace available), there was never a real need for the artifact
indirection. Inlining as a step after the artifact upload reuses the
ISO already in iso/out/ and skips the download entirely.
step-level continue-on-error preserves the original guarantee that a
VM-side flake doesn't mark the ISO build red.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
