Commit Graph
742 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Ettore Di Giacinto 4b9cd31dd3 fix(worker): check a gRPC port is free before handing it out
The backend port allocator allocated from its own bookkeeping alone. That
bookkeeping records what this worker did with a port, and the collision it
cannot see is with something this worker never did: the default base port is
50051, inside Linux's default ephemeral range of 32768 to 60999, so the kernel
hands ports in this range to outbound connections and to anything that binds
port 0. A backend handed one of those dies on bind, and the frontend sees a
backend that will not start.

Every candidate is now probed by binding the exact address the backend will
listen on, in all four allocation branches: the key's own port, the free pool,
a grown port and a stolen one. Probing the free pool matters as much as
probing a grown port, because a port this worker released is exactly as
available to the kernel as one it never used.

A candidate that fails the probe is quarantined rather than blacklisted, since
whatever holds it is usually an ephemeral connection that gives it back, and
its affinity claim is dropped so an unbindable port does not stay reserved for
the key that last held it. Exhaustion now says how many candidates were
skipped, which is what tells an operator "something else is in my range" from
"my range is too narrow".

This does not remove the race and cannot: between the probe and the child's
bind the kernel can still give the port away. It removes the far larger window
in which the allocator hands out a port the kernel gave away minutes ago,
which was the whole of the observed one-in-three harness flake. The e2e
harness comment that recorded the missing check is corrected, and the docs say
how to move the range out of the ephemeral one entirely.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-06 05:05:58 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto f207976281 fix(distributed): say that skills and collections are replica-local
Skills and RAG collections had no cross-replica invalidation, and the two
builders that would have published one were deleted earlier in this branch
because nothing called them. Wiring one now would be wrong, not merely late.

Both features are derived entirely from the frontend's own state directory.
A skills.Service indexes <state dir>/skills, a collections backend enumerates
<state dir>/collections and holds one handle per collection it found there,
and no replica reads or writes another replica's copy of either. In
distributed mode PostgreSQL carries a skill's NAME and description in
skills_metadata, and nothing else: Get, Search, Export and the resource verbs
all read local files. So a peer told to drop a cache entry would rebuild it
from a directory that does not hold the change. For a postgres-engine
collection it would be worse than a no-op, since re-deriving one on a replica
with no local index file yields a collection that answers with an empty file
list against a populated vector store. What is missing is shared storage, not
a broadcast.

Recorded rather than left silent: the two cache fields say why nothing
invalidates them, a distributed frontend logs the limitation once at startup,
and the docs name the two deployments that avoid it. The new spec pins the
premise, so a change that moved either directory onto storage every replica
mounts reddens and the decision gets taken again.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-06 05:05:46 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto a1b5c177bc feat(cluster): make a peer prove which replica it is
GET /api/cluster/peer authenticated with the deployment's shared
registration token and took the dialling replica's id from ?id= on trust.
Every worker holds that token, so anything holding it could open a peer
link as any replica: relay through it to every worker tunnel that replica
owns, displace a real replica's inbound link by declaring its id, and
point the roughly 31 GiB per-session receive window at one replica.

Validating the id against the instances table does not fix this, because
the attack declares a real replica's id. So the route now checks two
credentials and needs both. The shared token still says the dialler
belongs to this deployment; a new per-replica credential says which
replica it is.

The credential follows the per-node worker credential rather than
inventing a second mechanism: crypto/rand.Text, stored only as a hex
SHA-256, compared in constant time, with no fallback to the shared token.
It differs in the stronger direction. A worker's credential is minted by
the frontend and handed over once; a replica writes its own instances
row, so it mints its own secret, publishes only the hash in the same
statement that publishes its address, and never sends the plaintext
anywhere but the peer dial.

A peer that presents no credential is refused, not waved through. An old
replica and an attacker holding the shared token send the same request,
so accepting the first accepts the second; there is no safe downgrade
here, only a quiet one. The refusal is made loud instead, on both sides,
naming the upgrade rather than the network. On the documented
frontend-first order a new replica still dials an old one; an old replica
cannot dial a new one, which costs relayed requests that land on a
not-yet-restarted replica and surfaces as no route, never as absence.

A rejected peer gets its own sentinel, ErrPeerRejected, whose unwrap
chain carries ErrPeerUnreachable as well and no absence sentinel at all.
Keeping the older sentinel means no existing consumer changes behaviour;
the cause stays out of the chain, so absence cannot escape through it and
nothing can read an authorization failure as a worker that went away.

One consequence beyond the fix: a replica with no advertised address has
no instances row, so it now cannot dial out either. It was already
unreachable inward. The startup error and the docs say so.

Registry.Register, NewMembership, NewPeerPool, PeerHandler and
RegisterClusterRoutes all gained required arguments, so the identity
cannot be dropped without a compile failure.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-06 04:05:56 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 730d259976 chore(distributed): take the nats-io modules out of the build
Distributed mode has not dialled a message broker since the control plane
moved onto the workers' own outward tunnels and every fan-out family moved
onto PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY. What was left was the dependency itself, and
the code that existed only to feed it.

Dropped from go.mod: nats-io/jwt/v2, nats-io/nats.go, nats-io/nkeys,
nats-io/nuid and testcontainers-go/modules/nats, along with the fourteen
indirect requires that only the NATS testcontainer pulled in. go.sum carries
no nats line either, so the removal is not the partial kind where the require
goes and the checksum stays.

Deleted with them: pkg/natsauth in full, the broker client's remaining
options and TLS files, the per-node JWT minting on both the register and the
approve path, and the natsauth.Config parameter threaded through the node
routes. The credential manager is renamed and stripped rather than deleted,
because it still holds the tunnel token that every re-registration rotates.

The bus flags stay accepted and ignored, and are now hidden, on every command
that had them, so an existing unit file, compose file or Helm values file
still starts on the day of the upgrade. What is not kept is the validation
that REQUIRED one: a distributed frontend started with no bus URL is no
longer fatal. The TLS paths lose type:"existingfile" deliberately, so a
certificate deleted along with the broker cannot fail a startup.

One operator-visible behaviour change: --nats-require-auth no longer makes an
agent worker wait through admin approval. Ask for that wait with
--distributed-require-auth, which already implied it. It is documented in the
migration section and pinned from both sides.

A deployment now needs PostgreSQL and the frontends' own HTTP listener, and
nothing else.

coverage-baseline.txt moves from 54.2 to 62.0.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-05 03:27:17 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto d3dfad90b9 chore(distributed): stop telling an operator to run a NATS cluster
Every carrier had already moved and no process opened a bus connection, but
the surface an operator reads still described a deployment with a broker in
it: a compose service, a 220-line credential-generation script, two CI steps
pulling a container nothing started, two flag tables offering --nats-url, an
architecture diagram with a NATS box wired to the workers, a join-command
generator in the Nodes page that emitted --nats-url for agent workers, and a
test suite that stood a NATS server up for specs that no longer used it.

That is the one way this programme could still fail invisibly. Every test
passes, every binary works, and every production deployment goes on running
and paying for infrastructure that carries nothing.

Nothing in this repository starts a NATS server any more. The compose file is
four services, the docs say to shut the broker down and what to keep, and the
e2e suite runs on one PostgreSQL container.

The three LOCALAI_NATS_*_TIMEOUT env vars are KEPT, and are now documented
twice as being kept. They were never broker settings: each names a control-RPC
budget the frontend applies to a worker, still read and still enforced. They
carry the prefix only because they arrived with the bus, and renaming them
would break every existing deployment for cosmetics.

The agent worker's join command was the last surface still emitting the flag,
two tasks after the agent worker stopped dialling. The Playwright spec that
covered it asserted the opposite of what is now true, so it is inverted rather
than deleted, and it reads the rendered command string rather than the
component's variables: the variables are what the fix removes, so a spec
reading them would have stopped compiling instead of failing, and a compile
error is not evidence about what an operator is shown.

nats_jwt_test.go and its helpers are deleted. They pinned a real server
ENFORCING the minted permissions. The CONTENT of those allow lists is still
pinned, untouched, by pkg/natsauth's own suites, including the spec that
refuses to let the agent lists go empty, since an empty allow list in NATS
means unrestricted. The enforcement half is retired rather than moved:
enforcement is a property of a connection, and nothing opens one.

The suite's own NATS container goes with them, which the brief left for the
next task. Removing the pre-pull while BeforeSuite still ran the image would
have defeated the step rather than cleaned it up, and this change removes the
last reader of TestInfra.NC. agent_native_executor_test.go and
mcp_ci_job_test.go are moved onto infra.Bus() instead of deleted: they were
the last two specs building a bridge and a dispatcher on a client nobody uses,
which is exactly the drift TestInfra.Bus's own comment warns about.

cluster.Options.NatsURL is now fed a deliberately dead address rather than a
live container's. Frontends and agent workers still receive LOCALAI_NATS_URL,
because that is the coverage for the promise that an existing command line
still starts; sourcing it from a running server would have let a regression
that actually dialled it pass. The control in cluster_control_test.go keeps
its assertion and loses its explanation, which claimed the deployment had a
bus and no longer could.

One latent spec race surfaced and is fixed: the background-run spec waited for
a COUNT of events and then read a snapshot for the terminal status, which is
the last event of a run and therefore always arrives after the count is met.
Its immediate twin had already been fixed this way. Nothing in production
changed.

pkg/natsauth keeps its files. It is reachable from production only through the
natsauth.Config parameter thread, and that thread is the next task's.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 07:46:08 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto a6b2d7c0ec fix(distributed): read a departed agent tunnel as the routing fact it is
Task 4 gave agent workers tunnels and deliberately left the NodeType skip in
HealthMonitor.tunnelDeparted, with a spec asserting that an agent node whose
presence reader answers PresenceGone is NOT marked unhealthy. That spec was
scaffolding. It was true while an agent worker took its jobs and its verbs over
the message bus: a departure row for one said nothing about whether it could
work, and an early bug in the new tunnel client could otherwise have demoted a
fleet of healthy agent workers.

There is no bus. An agent worker is reachable through its tunnel and through
nothing else, so a departed agent tunnel means exactly what a departed backend
tunnel means: no live replica holds it, the departure has outlived the reconnect
grace, and that is a routing fact the scheduler and a reaper may act on. The
skip would now hide the only symptom an unreachable agent worker has. This is
the deliberate removal Task 4's M6 predicted, and task-4-report.md is where that
mutation already stands recorded red against the spec this commit deletes.

The skip existed at ONE site. router_liveness.go has none: its candidates come
from queries that already filter node_type = 'backend'. The two skips in
managers_distributed.go stay, because an agent worker still runs no backend
processes, so it has no backend to list and no backend op to apply.

Two node types can depart now, which is why the second half exists. Before this,
one type could depart and every per-node cache a departure left stale was
dropped from wherever its owner happened to notice, so a reader could not tell
which caches a demotion invalidated by reading the demotion path. Departure gets
ONE notification point. DepartureNotifier is edge triggered, because the monitor
runs on a ticker and a departed node stays departed; its subscribers are NAMED,
because what has to be caught is a forgotten cache and a count can say only that
one of four is missing; and NewHealthMonitor takes it as a required positional
argument, so a caller that does not pass one fails to compile.

Four caches subscribe: prefix-cache affinity in every model, probe freshness at
every address, in-flight staging operations, and the per-node breakdown of every
open gallery operation. The prefix-cache one is registered only when
prefix-cache routing is enabled, so --distributed-prefix-cache=false stays a
true no-op. The notification carries the node's name as well as its id, because
the staging tracker keys on the name and the other two key on the id, and a
subscriber should not have to read the registry from inside an eviction hook.

A departure notification is an act on absence, so it fires only on the routing
fact. A tunnel lost inside the grace, a worker that never dialled, a presence
query that failed and a stale heartbeat all announce nothing, asserted per node
type. The stale-heartbeat branch is excluded on purpose: it already marks the
node offline, which deletes its rows and runs the registry's replica-removed
hooks, so firing there too would double-evict and make the notification mean two
different things at its subscribers.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 06:33:14 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 3b4858851a feat(distributed): carry an agent cancel on the worker's own tunnel
agent.<name>.cancel was the last family on a message bus, and the only
reason an agent worker dialled one. Its subscriber is the worker running
the execution, and a worker has no database, so the family could not move
to the PostgreSQL fan-out carrier: a cancel published there would reach no
worker while reporting that it had been sent.

It is a control verb now. An agent worker mounts workerctl.PathAgentCancel
on the loopback control plane behind its tunnel and applies the cancel to
the same registry the executor registers a run on. The frontend issues it
through nodes.AgentControlClient.CancelAgentRun.

That call is a FAN-OUT and not a pick, because nothing records which worker
holds a given execution: the claim row names the claiming replica, and it
is deleted when the run ends. Every agent worker a live replica can reach
is asked over its own tunnel, relayed by the peer mesh when a peer holds
it, and each worker answers only for itself.

The answers stay apart, which is why this family was held back. A cancel a
worker made is nil. A cancel some worker could not be asked is
ErrAgentCancelUndelivered, which is neither a refusal nor a missing run. A
cancel every reachable worker declined to own is ErrAgentRunNotOnAnyWorker.
A deployment with no agent worker is ErrNoAgentWorker. Neither new sentinel
wraps ErrWorkerUnroutable and neither is a worker answer, so nothing is
reaped, demoted or evicted because of a cancel.

A worker in the ABSENT CONNECTION condition, one whose tunnel was lost
inside the reconnect grace, counts as undelivered. It is not retried in the
call and not queued: a retry would spend a budget the caller did not
choose, and a queue would need durable state whose only consumer is a run
whose control stream went with the tunnel. A worker whose departure has
outlived the grace is the one routing fact a caller may act on and is
excluded, or a single retired agent node would make every cancel
undelivered for ever.

The fan-out reads a different node set from the pick. A draining worker
takes no new work but is still finishing what it holds, so it is offered
the cancel; a pending one is refused by the tunnel route on every dial and
is not.

With that, nothing in LocalAI connects to NATS. The agent worker's dial,
its credential ladder and its refresh loop are gone, and so is the
frontend's cancel carrier. LOCALAI_NATS_URL is accepted and ignored
everywhere, and distributed mode no longer requires it.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 05:18:02 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto b45076c5f7 refactor(distributed): delete MessagingClient and shrink the NATS client to fan-out
Nothing in the tree publishes, subscribes, queue-subscribes or requests through
the MessagingClient interface any more, so it is deleted rather than shrunk to
Broadcaster: two exported names for one method set in one package is an
invitation for the next author to pick whichever the surrounding file already
imported.

    $ grep -rn 'messaging\.MessagingClient' --include='*.go' .
    core/services/syncstate/syncstate.go:54:  // It is messaging.Broadcaster rather than messaging.MessagingClient because

(one hit, a comment; no live referent. The naive grep in the plan also matches
prose and the local test type names fakeMessagingClient and
countingMessagingClient, so it can never be empty.)

*messaging.Client is shrunk to exactly Broadcaster plus its own lifecycle.
QueueSubscribe, QueueSubscribeReply, SubscribeReply, Request, Conn and the
package helpers QueueSubscribeJSON and RequestJSON go with it; none had a
production caller. Deleting the methods rather than only the call sites is what
makes putting a family back on this carrier a build error instead of a line that
compiles, publishes successfully, and is delivered onto a carrier the deployment
is being taken off. Conn is in that list because while it existed every other
name was one c.Conn().X() away; the flush-and-verdict that its real consumers
needed is now ConfirmRoundTrip, which keeps the NATS JWT permission specs armed.

The client, its options and its TLS plumbing are NOT deleted, and both processes
stay on the bus. agent.<name>.cancel is the one fan-out family that could not
move: its only subscriber is the agent worker, which has no database and cannot
join the PostgreSQL carrier at all, so a cancel published there would reach no
worker and be reported as sent. The frontend passes the client to
newFanoutBridges as its cancelCarrier and the worker subscribes on it, so
--nats-url stays required on agent-worker. Both go with the tunnel cancel verb.

The struct field is renamed Nats -> CancelCarrier to say what it is for, and
agentpool loses the messaging.Publisher it held only to be non-nil: it never
published on it, and it was gating whether a frontend runs agents distributed or
in an in-process pool. Retiring the bus would have flipped every replica back to
the in-process pool silently. The gate now reads the agent store, which is the
dependency the mode actually requires.

Also deletes four subject builders with no production publisher
(SubjectFineTuneProgress, SubjectFineTuneCancel, SubjectCacheInvalidateSkills,
SubjectCacheInvalidateCollection), the queue and request/reply halves of the
shared test double, and the e2e specs that were their only callers. Every
surviving subject is now pinned to its exact literal, because a subject is a
cross-version wire format and a rename that looks internal stops half a fleet
hearing the other half.

Docs: distributed-mode.md and cli-reference.md no longer claim NATS carries the
agent-worker job subjects, the frontend's cross-replica events, or an agent
worker's real work.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 03:51:06 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 44cb495169 feat(distributed): move the last nine fan-out families onto PostgreSQL
Gallery progress and cancel, the operation cache's start and end, the model
and backend cache invalidations, staging progress, and the prefix cache's
observations and invalidations now travel on the LISTEN/NOTIFY carrier. No
subject is published or subscribed on messaging.Client anywhere in the tree,
which is what makes retiring that package a deletion rather than a migration:

  $ grep -rn 'natsClient\.Publish\|nats\.Publish\|\.Nats\.Publish\|QueueSubscribe\|SubscribeReply\|\.Request(' \
      --include='*.go' core/ pkg/ | grep -v _test \
    | grep -v 'c\.Request()\|ctx\.Request()\|Request()\.Context' \
    | grep -v 'core/services/testutil/fakebus.go'
  core/services/messaging/client.go:168,170,172,227,234,236,250,252,254,268,269,287
  core/services/messaging/interfaces.go:21,22,23

Every remaining hit is inside core/services/messaging itself. The production
reads of the NATS client are now three, all of them the documented agent-worker
exception: Close on shutdown, the agent pool's publisher, and the agent-cancel
carrier passed to newFanoutBridges.

Prefix-cache observations publish like every other family rather than through a
method that refuses a message too large for a notification. The plan proposed
such a refusal on the reasoning that a long prompt makes a chain of thousands of
entries; ExtractChain caps a chain at Config.MaxDepth blocks, MaxDepth is a
constant with no operator knob, and the chain reaching Sync.Observe has one
source, the router's own extraction hook. A worst-case observation is a few
kilobytes against an 8000-byte cap, so the hot-path spill the refusal was
designed to avoid cannot occur, and shipping it would have added the programme's
only deliberate message drop to guard a condition that cannot arise. pgbus gains
FitsInline instead, a predicate that shares one size decision with Publish and
decides nothing, and core/application refuses at startup to wire a prefix cache
whose configured depth would put every observation over the cap.

The carrier choice is no longer stated at four sites. StagingTracker.SetPublisher
and SubscribeBroadcasts become one SetBroadcaster, so a tracker that publishes
where its peers are not listening cannot be spelled; prefixcache.Sync gains
SubscribeBroadcasts, which reads the carrier it publishes on; and the gallery
service and the operation cache are wired by methods on DistributedServices that
name no carrier at all, so the NATS client beside it cannot be handed over.
OpCache.SetMessagingClient and GalleryService.SetNATSClient are renamed to
SetBroadcaster so a missed call site fails to compile.

Two pre-existing defects that the two-real-carrier specs surfaced are fixed. A
progress tick published before a cancel and delivered after it cleared Cancelled
and left the operation reading as still running on that replica; mergeStatus now
drops a stale tick rather than merging it. GetStatus and GetAllStatus handed out
the stored OpStatus pointer while the broadcast subscribers mutated it in place,
so an /api/operations response could be marshalled mid-write; both now copy.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 02:55:15 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 5a95bb3c0a refactor(distributed): move job and agent fan-out onto the PostgreSQL carrier
Five of the six families whose subscriber is an open HTTP response rather
than a process-lifetime cache now travel on pgbus: jobs.<id>.progress,
jobs.<id>.result, jobs.<id>.cancel, agent.<name>.events.<user> and
responses.<id>.cancel. Both ends of each move together, so there is no
state where a publisher is on one carrier and its subscriber on the other.

agent.<name>.cancel does NOT move, and the plan was wrong about why. Its
only subscriber in the tree is the agent worker, which has no database and
so cannot join the PostgreSQL carrier at all. Publishing that cancel on
pgbus would have lost every cancel of a worker-run agent while returning
nil, which reports a cancel that reached nobody as a cancel that was sent.
EventBridge now names its cancel carrier separately, a frontend replica
sets it to the carrier the worker reads, and it stays there until a cancel
rides the worker's tunnel like every other verb addressed to a worker.

The carrier drops at 256 rather than blocking, which is not safe on its own
for a result: a lost result has no successor message. It is not the only
path. The claiming replica persists the terminal line before it releases
the claim, and an open progress stream re-reads the job row once after
subscribing and then periodically, so a dropped terminal broadcast costs
promptness and never the answer.

Both per-request subscriptions close in a defer instead of on one return
path, and pgbus grows Subscribers() so the leak they would otherwise cause
can be asserted. It has no other symptom: only the first subscriber of a
channel issues a LISTEN, so a leaked filter just adds one closure per
notification for every stream the replica has ever served. Subscribe now
issues its LISTEN before it registers, which makes that count a readiness
signal rather than a figure to compare against itself.

Two rules that were stated at several sites and pinned at none are now one
each. The re-broadcaster is built beside the dispatcher and the bridge and
handed to the dispatch loop, so no line is left that can point it at a
carrier nobody subscribes to while every spec stays green. The set of
statuses a job never leaves is one exported set that the SSE bridge and the
store both read. The last hand-written subject filter in production code
became messaging.SubjectAgentEventsWildcard.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-04 01:47:34 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 245010f2f6 feat(distributed): carry the state.*.delta families on PostgreSQL
syncstate.Config held one carrier field typed as the NATS client, so a
pgbus.Bus could not be handed to a SyncedMap at all: it satisfies
messaging.Broadcaster and not MessagingClient. The durable re-hydration
path built for the responses map therefore had a NATS-only consumer and
nothing in the build said so.

The field becomes Bus messaging.Broadcaster, SubscribeJSON moves to its
own file and relaxes its parameter to Broadcaster, and the four adopters
fan out over PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY: fine-tune jobs, quantization jobs,
agent tasks with their per-tenant children, and Open Responses metadata.
A new spec proves it on a real database, over two Bus instances on two
pinned listener connections: a Set and a Delete carry, a payload past the
8000-byte notification cap comes back byte identical through the spill
row, two families sharing one LISTEN channel stay separate, and a
terminated listener re-hydrates a row written while it was gone.

The five sites that each chose a carrier for an adopter are collapsed
into one DistributedServices.Broadcast() accessor. Five field reads were
five chances to leave one family on NATS with nothing failing, because
messaging.Client satisfies Broadcaster too. The accessor also refuses to
hand out a nil pgbus.Bus wrapped in a non-nil interface, which every
adopter would read as "broadcast" and dereference on the first Set.
SetTaskSyncNATS and SetJobSyncNATS are renamed to SetTaskSyncBus and
SetJobSyncBus so a missed wiring site fails to compile.

The response metadata table gains a retention of its own, defaulting to
24 hours. It inherited the Open Responses store TTL, which defaults to 0
meaning no expiration. Zero is defensible for a map that dies with the
process and is not for a table: the table grew for the life of the
deployment and a restarting replica re-hydrated every response the
cluster had ever created. A row that names its own expiry is still judged
on that column alone, and "this row is dead" now has one SQL spelling
that PurgeExpired deletes by and ListUnexpired is the negation of, so a
hydrate cannot resurrect what a sweep has already retired.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 22:50:54 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 09acb3823a fix(distributed): give one tenant's agent tasks a subject of their own
Every AgentJobService built its tasks SyncedMap with the name "agent.tasks",
and there is one service per user. So every tenant published on and subscribed
to the same subject, state.agent-tasks.delta, and SyncedMap.apply scopes
nothing: a task tenant A created was written into tenant B's in-memory map on
every replica, and ListTasks reads that map. Nothing repaired it short of a
process restart.

The subject now carries the tenant in a token of its own,
state.<name>.<tenant>.delta. Four tokens where the unscoped builder makes
three, deliberately: SubjectMatches compares token count before anything else,
so a tenant's subject and the cluster-wide one cannot cross-match, and neither
can two tenants. Putting the tenant inside the name token would not do that,
because the sanitizer folds '.' to '-' and the only filter that could then span
tenants is state.*.delta, which spans every other family too.

The rule is stated once. subscribeFilters calls publishSubject rather than
restating the subject, so a map cannot end up publishing scoped and subscribing
unscoped, which would leak exactly as before while every publish assertion
passed. The one case that decides on its own is the cluster-wide administrative
view: it hydrates from every tenant's rows, so it also takes the per-tenant
wildcard, or it would be stale the moment any tenant wrote. A tenant hydrates
from its own rows and applies only its own deltas. PerTenant defaults to false,
so finetune, quantization and the responses store keep the subject they have.

The second half of the same defect was the delete. taskStoreAdapter.Delete
called DeleteTask(id) and JobStore deleted by primary key with no user
predicate, reachable from DELETE /api/agent/tasks/:id, which takes the id off
the URL. A tenant who learned another tenant's task id destroyed that tenant's
row. The user id now travels with the id and lands as a user_id predicate.
Empty stays the administrative any-owner scope, the same thing an empty id
already means for ListTasks and ListJobs. A foreign delete removes nothing and
returns no error: not yours and not there are the same answer to the caller,
and neither is a store failure.

SetUserID rebuilds the tasks map for the same reason SetTaskSyncNATS does.
GetJobs happens to set the user id first, nothing enforced it, and with the
order reversed the map would be built with an empty tenant and put that user's
tasks back on the cluster-wide subject.

Both halves predate this programme; they are surfaced here rather than caused.
Neither is fully closed for a deployment with the agent pool off, where the
task routes are still served by one cluster-wide service that every
authenticated caller shares; that is a separate gap and it is documented.

testutil.FakeBus grew a real defect this was the first change to trip:
Unsubscribe matched on the filter string, so with two subscribers on one
filter, closing one deafened the other. Subscriptions now carry an id.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 21:54:42 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 43f7a5d108 feat(distributed): give responses.metadata something to re-hydrate from
The responses.metadata SyncedMap had no durable Store, so its reconnect
re-hydrate replaced nothing. That was survivable while responses converged
through deltas on a broker that mostly stayed up. It is not survivable on a
carrier whose listener is one pinned PostgreSQL session: every response created
while the subscription was down stays invisible on that replica forever, and the
symptom is a 404 from one replica and a 200 from another for the same
response_id.

State that must survive a gap now lives in a response_metadata table, and the
notification only says it changed. The map writes through on a Set and reads the
table on hydrate, on reconnect and on reconcile, so the gap closes instead of
becoming permanent.

The row carries the whole projection as JSON rather than one column per field. A
column-per-field schema would be a second definition of what a peer may act on,
and the two would drift the first time syncedResponse gained a field: the map
would broadcast the new field and hydrate without it, so a replica that had
reconnected would serve a different response body from one that had not, with
nothing failing anywhere. Only PayloadJSON is ever decoded; owner_replica and
owner are indexed copies for an operator reading the table by hand.

A missing row and an unreachable database are different facts. Every store and
adapter method returns a driver failure as an error and never as an empty
result, and syncstate replaces nothing when its source errors, so an outage
leaves the map holding what it had rather than blanking it into a cluster-wide
404.

Liveness is the database's clock, spelled expires_at IS NULL OR expires_at >
now(), because every replica hydrating from this table must agree on which rows
are live and a Go-side cutoff makes that a property of whichever process asked.
The test container shares the host clock, so no behavioural spec can tell the
two apart; the statement shape is pinned instead. The constructor refuses a
non-PostgreSQL handle, because an unguarded now() on the single-binary path
reads as a missing migration.

A ticker sweeps expired rows every five minutes on each replica, and Close waits
for it rather than racing it. Note that the sweep removes nothing while
LOCALAI_OPEN_RESPONSES_STORE_TTL is 0, which is the default: with no TTL nothing
ever expires and the table grows for the life of the deployment. The docs say so
plainly.

EnableDistributed takes the store positionally and last, so a call site that
forgets it fails to compile rather than silently restoring the deltas-only map
this change exists to replace. A nil store there is refused by name: it is
reached only from the distributed branch of route registration, so it is a
wiring bug and not a deployment shape.

What still never leaves the owning replica is unchanged: the resume buffer and
the CancelFunc. The write-through is one row per response state change, not one
per generated token.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 21:11:59 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 78f4ff7934 feat(distributed): dispatch queued work as a claim queue
The three NATS queue groups jobs.new, jobs.mcp-ci.new and agent.execute are
gone. Dispatching work is now a row in a work_claims table, taken by one
frontend replica with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED and driven on an agent
worker as a streaming control RPC over that worker's tunnel. Exactly-one
delivery among competing consumers is a database problem, not a broker feature.
An agent worker has no database, so it never claims; it executes what the
claiming replica hands it.

A claim must not outlive the replica that took it. The reap releases a claim
whose owner is no longer a live replica in the instances table, on the database
clock, and never asks how long the claim has been held. A job that legitimately
runs for an hour on a heartbeating replica is left alone, while a claim whose
owner stopped heartbeating becomes claimable again within one liveness window.
A replica with no advertised address has no instances row at all, so it refuses
to claim rather than have its work reaped out from under it mid-run.

The settle rule is stated once, in settleClaim, and every exit path calls it. A
transport failure releases the claim and never completes or discards it; only a
decoded reply line completes it. That line is deliberately not
cluster.IsWorkerAnswer, which accepts the stream refusals a worker's tunnel
writes before any request body reaches its control server: completing on those
would discard work that never ran.

The terminal line is persisted before the claim is completed, so a store that
refuses leaves the claim standing rather than leaving the job running for ever.
That is the dropped-result defect fixed structurally rather than by retry.

This also surfaces a pre-existing gap rather than causing one: no worker has
ever served plain task jobs, and publishing them into an empty queue group left
them running with no trace. Such a claim is now failed with a reason.

Removes QueueWorkers, --agent-subject and --agent-queue, and narrows an agent
worker's minted JWT by agent.execute and jobs.mcp-ci.new.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 20:22:34 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 9d7a2457d9 feat(distributed): stop a backend on one route, whatever the worker is
nodes.<id>.backend.stop was the last worker-facing NATS subject, and it existed
only because ONE publisher had not moved. An agent worker already mounted
workerctl.PathBackendStop on the tunnel it holds, and a backend worker already
took its stop there, so RemoteUnloaderAdapter branched on NodeType to pick a
carrier for a verb both kinds of worker served the same way.

The branch is gone, and with it nodeTypeOf and its NodeTypeBackend default,
which removes one of the ten NodeType branches left to sweep. The adapter loses
its messaging.MessagingClient outright rather than keeping an unused field: it
now holds no publisher, so re-routing any verb back onto the bus is a change to
the struct and to every caller of the constructor, and does not compile until
all of them agree. messaging.SubjectNodeBackendStop and subjectNodePrefix are
deleted, the agent worker's subscription with them.

pkg/natsauth drops the per-node backend.stop grant from the agent SUB list. That
is a narrowing of eleven entries to ten, never to nothing: NATS reads an EMPTY
allow list as unrestricted, so the coverage spec asserts both that the retired
subject is no longer covered and that the queue subjects an agent worker lives
on still are. The e2e half proves it against a real enforcing server: one spec
subscribes successfully on an agent-minted JWT, the next is refused the retired
subject on a JWT minted the same way.

Both halves of the old split were pinned, so both pins are re-aimed rather than
deleted, and the two node types are asserted separately rather than as one
parameterised case, because only two cases can show that the two used to differ.
Three assertions that the adapter published nothing are deleted instead: with no
publisher to hold, no change could ever redden them.

The CLI's handler set moves into agentWorkerControlHandlers so a spec can stand
it up and post to it. That wiring was a bare literal no spec pinned, and
deleting the subscription made it the ONLY carrier for backend.stop: a dropped
field would have been a 404 the frontend reads as a worker too old to serve the
verb, and nothing in the repo would have noticed.

Mutations: the agent branch restored off the control route reddens two specs;
the backend branch restored, separately, reddens five; PathBackendDelete in
place of PathBackendStop reddens nine across both node types; dropping the CLI
wiring line reddens the new wiring table; re-adding the allow-list entry reddens
the unit spec and the JWT e2e spec; and restoring the publisher for real does
not compile.

Four comments this change falsified are fixed, in core/cli, pkg/model and the
distributed-mode docs, which now say both kinds of worker serve
POST /v1/control/backend/stop and what each does with it.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 16:41:59 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 5effa47527 feat(distributed): make MCP execution and discovery a selection
mcp.tools.execute and mcp.discovery were the only NATS subjects that
combined a queue group with a reply, and no carrier in this design
provides both. They never needed one: a queue group is a way of choosing
a subscriber, and choosing is a query.

The frontend now lists the approved, non-draining agent nodes, asks the
node_connections table in one joined statement which of those tunnels a
live replica holds, prefers one this replica holds so the call skips the
relay hop, and issues an ordinary control RPC on the path task 4 already
mounted. A peer-held tunnel is reached through the relay. That is a
choice a broker's hidden balancing could not make.

The selection reads presence and nothing else. It is filtered only on
node type and on the two statuses an operator controls, never on a health
verdict written on another clock, because refusing a worker that is
connected and answering is the same defect as picking one that is gone.
An empty fleet answers ErrNoAgentWorker, which is deliberately neither
ErrWorkerUnroutable nor anything cluster.IsWorkerAnswer accepts: nothing
was asked of any worker, so no reap guard may act on it.

A reply carrying an Error is the worker's own answer and is returned
unchanged; it is never offered to a second worker, which would turn "this
MCP server rejected your arguments" into "the fleet is broken" and could
run a tool twice. A call that never reached a worker is retried against a
different pick, at most three times, and whatever error is finally
returned is returned unwrapped so its identity survives the loop.

MCP prompts and resources now answer 501 in distributed mode instead of
an empty 200. They are served only from sessions the frontend holds, and
in distributed mode it holds none. That gap predates the removal of the
bus and is not closed by it; this only stops it being silent.

Agent workers keep every other subject, including nodes.<id>.backend.stop.
Their minted JWT loses the two MCP subjects and keeps a non-empty allow
list, because NATS reads an empty one as no restriction at all.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 12:04:41 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 64059cd7d7 feat(distributed): give agent workers a tunnel of their own
Phase 2 gated agent nodes out of tunnel credentials at the mint site.
That was right while nothing dialled into an agent worker: a credential
would have replaced nothing, and the gate was structural rather than a
second check that could drift. It is wrong now that the frontend needs to
reach an agent worker by RPC.

attachTunnelToken mints for backend and agent nodes and CLEARS for
anything else, through one tunnelEligible predicate rather than two
conditions that can be widened separately. ConnectHandler still never
reads NodeType, so an empty hash is still what refuses an ineligible
node.

An agent worker now starts a loopback control server behind the same
bearer check a backend worker uses, and holds one tunnel whose only
stream tag is http: it runs no backend processes, so the grpc tag has
nothing to route to and is not offered. Its MCP tool, MCP discovery and
backend.stop verbs are served from ONE implementation reached by both the
bus and the tunnel, so a frontend cannot get different bytes depending on
which carrier delivered.

The tunnel is an ADDITION. --nats-url is still required, and agent jobs,
MCP execution, MCP CI jobs and nodes.<id>.backend.stop all still travel
on the bus.

Absence semantics are unchanged. An agent node now has a real
node_connections row whose departure ages past the grace, so the node
type check in HealthMonitor.tunnelDeparted stopped being an optimisation
and became the rule; its comment says so, and the spec that pins it is
shown red under a mutation that deletes the check. The scheduler needed
no change: every placement query already filters node_type = backend, so
an agent node never reaches nodeMayTakeWork.

Shared rules moved to one site each. The request bounds, the POST-only
check and the unknown-path 404 live in workerctl and are called by both
worker packages; the bearer check that guards every extra route is one
function in core/services/nodes used by both server constructors.
workerctl.AllPaths splits into BackendPaths and AgentPaths, with AllPaths
as their deduped union, because a backend worker does not mount the agent
verbs and asserting otherwise would fail a correct worker.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 11:22:38 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 49128cf486 feat(distributed): keep the listener draining and let it come back
PostgreSQL holds undelivered notifications in a queue it shares with every
session on the server, and it kills a listener that stops draining. Two failure
modes follow, and both are silent: a carrier that blocked on a slow resolver
would lose its connection and with it every later broadcast, and a carrier that
reconnected without re-registering would be connected and deaf.

The receive and dispatch halves were already separate. What was missing is
everything around them. The listener path moves into listener.go and gains a
carrier-level Dropped() so a replica that is behind can be seen; the queue depth
and the spill retention become Config fields with exported defaults; the LISTEN
session gets an application_name so an operator can count listeners in
pg_stat_activity and a spec can drop exactly one of them; and OnReconnect fires
after the re-LISTEN, on a goroutine of its own, because a callback re-hydrates
from a database and must never run on the path whose only job is to drain.

That callback is reached through an optional interface assertion, so deleting
its invocation compiles and every adopter silently stops converging. The spec is
the only guard, and it is named in a comment at the site.

The slow consumer is proved through the transport rather than a seam: an ACCESS
EXCLUSIVE lock on bus_messages stalls the resolver's spill SELECT for exactly as
long as the spec holds it, and the listener is shown still draining and dropping
while it does. The dropped connection is a pg_terminate_backend matched on the
carrier's own application name.

Neither Dropped nor IsConnected is on messaging.Broadcaster, and a spec asserts
that over the interface type. Both are facts about a frontend; the conditions a
scheduler acts on are facts about a worker, and no consumer holding the
interface can read one as the other.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 10:23:40 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto cf619fc91b feat(distributed): carry fan-out on PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY
Distributed mode needs an operator to run a NATS cluster. This adds the
carrier that replaces its fan-out half, so a deployment eventually needs
PostgreSQL and its own HTTP listener and nothing else.

pgbus holds one PostgreSQL session per replica, pinned for the life of
the process because LISTEN registrations belong to one backend session
and a pooled handle would lose them on the next checkout. Publishes go
out on the pool with pg_notify.

Subjects map onto a channel by their first token, from a closed set of
roots. A subject outside the set is refused at publish AND at subscribe
rather than mapped to a channel of its own: a channel name is capped at
63 bytes, and one LISTEN per job id would be unbounded. Refused rather
than dropped, because a subject that goes nowhere and reports nothing is
the class of defect this work exists to remove.

PostgreSQL refuses a notify payload of 8000 bytes or more, and several
subjects on this bus exceed that in normal operation: a job result
carries a whole LLM output, a gallery progress event carries one entry
per node. Those are written to a row and the notification carries the
id. What is measured against the cap is the ENCODED notification, not
the caller's payload, because the subject and the envelope travel too.

The filter grammar is not respelled here. Subscribe asks
messaging.ValidFilter and delivery asks messaging.SubjectMatches, which
makes this the first production caller of a matcher that had only test
doubles. New refuses a DSN that names a different database from the
pool: that pairing publishes successfully, delivers nothing, on every
replica, and reports no error anywhere.

Nothing publishes on it and nothing subscribes yet. The construction is
wired anyway, because the DSN has exactly one legitimate source and a
setting that decides whether any broadcast is delivered should not be
invented by whichever call site is migrated first.

Delivery is at-most-once, like NATS core. Nothing downstream may read a
message it did not receive as evidence about a node: a carrier that
cannot deliver is not a worker that is gone.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 06:28:03 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto dd9aff58ff feat(distributed): take the backend worker off NATS entirely
A local-ai worker no longer opens a bus connection. connectNATS and its
spec are gone; Run registers once, starts its tunnel, arms /readyz on that
tunnel, and heartbeats. The worker's bus credential flags (--nats-jwt,
--nats-user-seed, --nats-require-auth, the three TLS flags) and
Config.NatsAuthRequired go with it. --nats-url stays, accepted and
ignored, so an existing worker command line still parses.

/readyz was the thing most likely to wedge a tunnel-only worker: it
required a live NATS link, so a worker with no bus would have reported
itself unready forever. nodes.NATSReadiness becomes nodes.TunnelReadiness
over a local interface{ Connected() bool }, and worker.Tunnel gains
Connected(), backed by a mutex-guarded session field the loop publishes
and clears. A closed-but-not-yet-cleared session reads as disconnected:
the loop waits for every in-flight stream before it clears the field, and
the probe must answer not-ready through that wait.

The heartbeat gate is DELETED rather than re-pointed at the tunnel. The
heartbeat is the worker's own answer that its process is alive; whether
the frontend can reach it is a separate fact the frontend already holds
and ages against LOCALAI_WORKER_RECONNECT_GRACE. Withholding the
heartbeat would report an unreachable worker as an absent one on the one
path with no grace, where the health monitor marks it offline and its
pending backend ops are deleted behind it. heartbeatLoop is given no view
of the tunnel, so a gate cannot be added back without changing its
signature.

Removing the NATS credential manager from this path also removes a defect
it carried: its refresh loop re-registered on a timer to renew a JWT, and
Register CLEARS a node's NodeModel rows. Any backend worker running on
frontend-minted credentials had its replica rows deleted roughly every
18 hours.

Of core/cli/workerregistry, everything survives. The manager is still
used in full by core/cli/agent_worker.go, which still needs NATS: Acquire,
Provider, RefreshLoop, HasCredentials and TunnelToken are all untouched.
The backend worker simply calls RegisterFullWithRetry directly now.

WorkerPermissions is documented as serving agent nodes, and its non-agent
branch narrowed to _INBOX.> on both sides. It is NOT deleted: NATS reads
an empty allow list as no restriction, so returning nil would upgrade
every JWT the frontend still mints for a backend node from its own inbox
to the whole account.

Agent workers keep the bus everywhere: their CLI flags, their
subscriptions, the agent branch of WorkerPermissions, and the compose
service with its LOCALAI_NATS_URL and depends_on: nats.

Also corrected two flags the Nodes page advertised that do not exist
(--distributed-nats, --distributed-db), and a log line plus several
comments that still named a bus the code no longer touches.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 01:14:29 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 749cc7ad81 fix(distributed): let absence be decided by something, at all three call sites
Removing "Presence: clusterRegistry" from the options literal in
initDistributed left all seven suites and tests/e2e/distributed green.
The predicate was right and its input was silently nil, which returns the
deployment to absence being decided by nothing, with no log line and no
failing request. That is the fourth finding of this exact shape in this
phase.

The two assignments move out of a twenty-field literal into
distributedSchedulerOptions, a named function a unit spec can reach.
Deleting either is now red. The health monitor takes its presence reader
and grace as a required positional pair instead, so deleting those does
not compile at all. requireAbsenceWiring then refuses to start a
distributed frontend whose scheduler or health monitor has no source of
absence, because refusing to boot is the only symptom either failure has.

With a fresh heartbeat and a permanently gone tunnel there was no reaper
at all. A heartbeat says the worker's supervisor is alive; it says
nothing about whether anything here can reach that worker's backends,
because those are reached over the tunnel. A proxy that stops upgrading
WebSockets, a rotated registration credential or a reconnect loop longer
than the grace left a node listed healthy forever while every request for
a model already loaded on it failed "no route to that worker", and every
reaper keyed on the heartbeat. The health monitor now reads presence from
the same place and against the same window as the scheduler and demotes
such a node. That also ends the 15s re-promotion: the demotion arm
returns before the recovery arm, so the scheduler's demotion is no longer
undone on the next tick, and recovery needs the tunnel back rather than
just the heartbeat.

The demotion is status-only. MarkOffline would DELETE the node's rows,
and deleting rows on a presence read would give any future defect in that
read the widest blast radius in the system for nothing the demotion does
not already deliver.

LRU eviction is the third path that commits work to a node, and it read
only the stored status. A node full enough to be an eviction target is
exactly the node the VRAM and idle selectors never offer, so
pickReachableNode structurally cannot cover it. It now runs its chosen
node through the same nodeMayTakeWork predicate, demotes it and evicts
again rather than handing back an install that cannot land. Presence is
read after the transaction and not inside it: reading it inside would
hold a FOR UPDATE lock across a query needing a second pooled connection,
which is how concurrent evictions deadlock a pool.

Also: a router built with a presence reader and no grace now has its
documented default pinned by a spec rather than only claimed by a
comment; ageDeparture asserts RowsAffected, since an UPDATE matching
nothing succeeds and the inside-the-grace spec returned the same verdict
either way; the scheduler comment that still described the bus is
corrected; the docs stop conflating heartbeat recovery with tunnel
recovery and name the third reader; and an overlong rewrapped line in
membership.go is folded.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-03 00:33:21 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 93af91419b feat(distributed): read worker absence from the database, not from a bus timeout
The scheduler decided whether a worker had gone away from
nats.ErrNoResponders: one frontend's observation that nobody answered IT
within a request budget. Two replicas asking in the same moment could
disagree and demote each other's workers, and a worker re-homing its
tunnel between replicas looked identical to one that had died.

SmartRouter now reads cluster.Presence instead. Only PresenceGone -- no
live replica holds the tunnel AND the departure has outlived the
reconnect grace -- excludes a node from placement, and it is a fact every
replica reads identically from the database. PresenceReconnecting,
PresenceUnknown and a failed presence query are all non-verdicts and
place work as normal: excluding on a database hiccup would cost the fleet
its capacity for a reason that has nothing to do with any worker.

nodeAnswersOnBus is deleted. It excluded on a sentinel no control RPC can
produce, so it decided nothing while PingNode cost a relayed round trip
per scheduling decision to feed it. PingNode goes with it, from the
adapter and from NodeCommandSender. isRequestTimeout drops nats.ErrTimeout:
every verb this adapter sends now travels over the worker's tunnel.

The predicate is named nodeMayTakeWork rather than nodeHasRoute. "Route"
is ErrWorkerUnroutable in this package, the condition nobody may act on;
PresenceGone is the one a scheduler may. Spelling them the same way is
the collapse this work exists to prevent.

Also folds in ReapStale's return rename: it counts connection rows
CLEARED, never rows deleted, and reading it as a delete count would make
a worker that is re-dialling right now look forgotten.

The spec pinning that a message merely quoting "nats: timeout" is not a
timeout was scripting a SUCCESSFUL reply carrying the phrase, which comes
back with a nil error and never reaches the classifier. Restoring the
string match left it green. It now scripts a 5xx whose body carries the
phrase, and asserts that the phrase reaches the classifier as a
precondition.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 22:28:49 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 4c3e0deb19 test(distributed): pin the unreadable-request rule at all three file verbs
The rule "a body this worker could not parse is a non-2xx, never the
worker's answer" is written at three exits in control_files.go and only
ensure was pinned. Turning stage's or listdir's decode exit into a
200-with-error left worker and nodes entirely green, and what that
converts is a frontend's malformed request into the worker's own verdict
about a file, which passes cluster.IsWorkerAnswer and reaches a reap
guard. The production code was already right; nothing held it there.

The e2e NATS JWT spec was asserting the opposite of the code and passing.
It published nodes.<id>.files.in and called it an allowed subject after
that grant was deleted, and it could not tell: a permission violation
does not close the connection, so FlushTimeout and IsConnected both stay
happy. It now reads LastError, the way its sibling always has, and
asserts the denial plus the one publish right a backend worker has left.

Also pinned, each mutation-verified alone: the CreateTemp branch (an
existing staging-tmp at 0500 reaches it without a seam), the walk's
context check (a caller that gave up must fail the listing, never be
answered with a short one), and the cache and data directory layout.

The data directory was derived twice, once in worker.go and once for the
listdir verb; worker.go now reads the same helper, so a move cannot leave
a verb listing files the file server does not serve. The per-verb RPC
ceiling moves from an argument at five call sites into fileRPCBudget,
so no site can name the wrong one, and the two values are asserted.

The body-cap table now holds both directions locally and with two
different claims: a body exactly at the cap proves the bound is a
ceiling and not an off-by-one, and an absolute megabyte proves the cap
stays above real gallery traffic. Only the second notices a cap shrunk
to 64 KiB.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 21:54:04 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 7fc617c8ed feat(distributed): serve file staging over the worker tunnel
The four nodes.<id>.files.* subjects were the last commands a
serve-backend worker took off the bus. They are now HTTP routes under
workerctl.Prefix, on the same loopback server and behind the same bearer
check as the ten lifecycle verbs, so the frontend reaches them through
the worker's tunnel.

files.listdir is the verb this matters most for. Its reply had to fit a
payload the bus would carry, which put a wide model directory close to
the limit; a response body has no such ceiling, so nothing truncates the
listing at either end. A short listing reads to the frontend as files
the worker does not have.

S3NATSFileStager becomes S3FileStager and calls ControlClient, which
means every failure now lands in the bucket phase 3 exists to keep
straight: a route this frontend could not use is unroutable and nothing
may act on it, while the worker's own answer, including "that file is
not there", is evidence a caller may act on. Each RPC's deadline is
DERIVED FROM the caller's context rather than started fresh, at every
one of the five call sites, so a caller that gave up stops the RPC too.

A worker started without an object store mounts no file verb at all and
answers 404, which is the same answer a build too old to know them
gives. The subjects and the backend worker's files.> publish grant go
with them; a backend worker now publishes nowhere but its own inbox.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 21:15:19 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 44f12b2adb feat(distributed): call the worker's control routes instead of the bus
The ten backend and model lifecycle verbs stop being NATS requests and
become HTTP calls on the worker's own control routes, reached through
that worker's tunnel on the `http` stream tag that already carries file
staging. Nine subject builders and the per-op install-progress subject
are deleted with their entries in the worker's NATS permissions; the
request and reply DTOs are untouched, so a body on the wire is byte for
byte what the subject carried.

This closes the merge gate Task 3 left open, which was worse than lost
commands. Once the worker stopped subscribing, PingNode was still asking
nodes.<id>.backend.list and nodes.<id>.models.running, so EVERY healthy
worker answered no-responders, nodeAnswersOnBus read it as absence and
pickReachableNode demoted it on the scheduling path. PingNode is a
control RPC now, and no control RPC can produce ErrNoResponders, which
is the only error that exclusion acts on. Two specs drive
pickReachableNode against a real adapter and a worker answering over its
control plane, which is the only arrangement that can see the difference:
the router's own double never touches a transport and stayed green for
the whole window the defect was live.

How a control RPC FAILS is the whole of this change, so it is decided in
ONE function reading ONE table. A worker's answer passes through
unwrapped, so cluster.IsWorkerAnswer still sees it and a reap guard may
act on it; everything else is wrapped in ErrWorkerUnroutable so nothing
can. There is no third branch, because a third branch is how the eight
collapses on this branch happened: each was a site that decided for
itself which errors were evidence. A 404 under the prefix is its own
sentinel, because it is the worker stating a deployment fact about
ITSELF rather than a verdict about a backend, and only the legacy
upgrade fallback may act on it.

The caller's budget is checked FIRST. A timeout is not a verdict: a
refusal arriving in the instant a deadline expires would otherwise be
reported as the worker's non-transient answer, which reaps a row, and
nothing orders the two timers.

A 5xx and an undecodable body are transport failures, not answers. An
empty ModelsRunningReply means "this worker is running nothing", which
the reconciler acts on, so it must never be manufactured from a body
that would not parse. A stream that ends before its reply line is the
same rule one layer up: a tunnel dying mid-install is not the worker
saying the install failed.

backend.stop is split by node type rather than moved. Agent workers hold
no tunnel, so they have no control plane to serve, and they still
subscribe to nodes.<id>.backend.stop to drop cached MCP sessions; that
subject and its agent permission both survive. It is the honest
intermediate state until agent workers hold tunnels too.

A failed control RPC no longer demotes a node anywhere. ErrNoResponders
meant "not on the bus"; a control failure means "this frontend could not
route to it", which is equally what a healthy worker re-homing its tunnel
between replicas produces. Absence is a fact read from the database, and
the scheduler starts reading it in a later task.

The rolling-update fallback re-fires a DESTRUCTIVE force-reinstall, so
it runs only on the worker's own 404. Its negative direction was pinned
at the admin call site and unpinned at the reconciler's, where widening
the condition to any error left all 676 specs green: a background drain
nobody is watching would then force-reinstall every queued backend the
moment a replica lost its tunnels. Three specs cover it, arranged so the
force install IS reachable in the negative case and a fallback that
fired would show as a call and a drained row.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 19:43:53 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto f9d0d4c5c6 fix(worker): pin the rune cut, answer unload honestly, drop the dead publisher
Review fix round 1. Seven non-blocking findings; the blocking one is a
merge gate for Task 4 rather than anything in this diff, and the report's
concern about it is corrected: until Task 4 lands, PingNode probes two
subjects no serve-backend worker subscribes to any more, so every healthy
worker reads as absent and is marked unhealthy on the scheduling path.

The rune-boundary cut in truncate was true behaviour with nothing
holding it: a byte-wise mutation survived all 201 specs. isRuneStart is
replaced by utf8.RuneStart, the same predicate the cluster package uses
for this rule, and two specs pin it, one with a rune straddling the
bound and one with a rune ending exactly on it so the fix cannot be
"always walk back".

unloadModel answered Success:true whatever Free did. That is the worker
saying "done" about work it did not do, and the frontend's only caller
is EvictLRU, so a false yes told the scheduler VRAM had been released
and let it place the next model on a node still holding the old one. It
now reports the failure, following stopModelExact, which is the honest
pattern already in this package. Still a 200: the worker answered, only
its verdict is negative. An address with nothing loaded still answers
success, which is a true answer rather than a claim about work done.

NewDebouncedInstallProgressPublisher had no production caller after the
last commit, only its own spec. Deleted rather than wired: wiring it
would publish every event on two carriers, which is what the carrier
decision exists to avoid. Its specs now run against the sink, plus one
that pins the identity stamped on each event, since the subject used to
carry the op and node id and now nothing but the body does.

The install progress wiring was exercised by no spec, because with no
gallery nothing ever invokes the download callback. The guard moves into
startProgress, shared by install and upgrade, which also emits one
resolving event before any gallery work. That is worth having on its
own: a cold install spends minutes on a manifest and a progress stream
with nothing on it is indistinguishable from a broken one. It also makes
the wiring observable end to end, and four specs now drive the real
installBackend and upgradeBackend over HTTP with no override.

model/stop and backend/stop keep taking Background rather than the
caller's context, and the sites now say why. model/stop is the
acknowledged stop path: it reserves the process, frees it, kills it,
waits for exit and releases the port, and abandoning that because the
caller hung up would leave a process marked stopping, a port not
returned to the allocator and a row nothing reconciles. In
stopBackendExact the Free is a courtesy before a kill that happens
anyway. model/unload differs because Free IS the operation there.

A route set with no prefix or no registrar is now a startup error rather
than a silent no-op: a server that comes up healthy while every route
the caller registered answers 404 is, through a tunnel, indistinguishable
from a version skew. And the AllPaths spec no longer claims to catch a
constant that was never added to the set, which it cannot; it asserts
the whole set instead, which catches a verb dropped from it.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 16:21:41 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 49b3d22974 feat(worker): serve the control plane over the tunnel, not over NATS
Ten NATS subscriptions on the worker become ten HTTP routes under
/v1/control/, served on the loopback HTTP server the worker already runs
and reached only through the tunnel's existing `http` stream tag.

The carrier is the tag that already exists rather than a new one. A new
tag would have had to invent correlation, per-request deadlines,
unbounded payloads and a progress stream, and each of those is a place
this branch has already put a defect. It would also have added a fifth
entry to the worker's stream-refusal vocabulary, which decides what a
frontend reaps on and took eight fixes to settle. Riding `http` means a
control RPC to a worker another replica holds takes the same relay the
inference path takes, which is the path that has been measured.

The request and reply DTOs are untouched, so a body on a control route
is byte-for-byte what the corresponding subject carried. No subject was
deleted: agent workers still subscribe to nodes.<id>.backend.stop.

Install and upgrade stream. They answer application/x-ndjson: zero or
more {"progress":...} lines carrying the same event the per-op NATS
subject carried, then exactly one {"reply":...} line, always last. That
deletes the 8000-byte notification cap structurally instead of
reproducing it on a new carrier: a progress line is written into the
response the caller is already reading, so there is nothing to size and
no subscribe-before-request window. The debouncer is shared with the
NATS publisher rather than forked, so the ~4/s tick bound is one fact.

A verb's own failure is a 200 with Error set, never a 5xx. The frontend
maps a transport failure onto "no route to that worker", which nothing
may act on, and the worker's answer onto evidence a reap guard may act
on; answering 500 for a failed install would put the worker's verdict
in the bucket reserved for a broken link. Only a request that could not
be read or routed is non-2xx.

Control RPCs carry the caller's budget. r.Context() replaces four
context.Background() calls at the gallery-install sites, and the one
pre-existing fixed timeout on model.unload is now derived from the
caller's context so a shorter budget is honoured. No timeout is invented.

The inner `go func()` in the install and upgrade handlers is deleted
rather than nested: it existed because one subscription served every
install, and over HTTP each request already has its own goroutine.
Per-backend serialization stays lockBackend, which is what actually
prevented two requests racing the gallery directory.

Bounds against a boundary the worker now serves: every body is capped at
8 MiB before any decode; the 404 echoes at most 128 bytes of the request
path, cut on a rune boundary so a half rune cannot travel downstream as
a replacement character; non-POST is refused before the body is read so
a probe cannot fire a command; the streaming responses set nosniff.

The routes mount through nodes.AuthenticatedRoutes, which hands the
registrar a private mux and puts the whole prefix behind the same
constant-time bearer check as the file routes. The worker's HTTP server
now takes the supervisor as a required parameter, so there is no way to
start it without the control plane mounted.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 15:51:58 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 6e50f060a3 fix(cluster): pin the derived retention to the sweep that applies it
The retention a worker's departure is kept for is now derived from the
reconnect grace, so a purge can never outrun the window Presence measures
against. Nothing pinned that. The sweep could be reverted to pass the constant,
or the setter emptied out, and the suite stayed green either way: the specs
covered the arithmetic helper, and the fix is the wiring.

The loop now has a spec of its own. It departs two workers either side of the
difference between the floor and the derived retention, and the row that must
go is what witnesses the sweep running at all, so the row that must stay cannot
survive by nothing happening.

The default grace goes from 60s to 90s. Two of the worker's ceiling backoffs is
60s, but the failed dial between them costs its handshake timeout too, which
puts the worst case at 70s, and the backoff resets only after a session long
enough that a replica accepting a dial and then dying denies it. So the ceiling
is reachable exactly during the rolling restart this window exists for, and 60s
sat on the edge of it. Too short reports a live worker as gone and costs a
model reload; too long reaps a dead one later. The cheaper mistake is the long
one.

A held row whose owner is dead and whose stamp is stale is the state a rolling
upgrade actually produces, and it was the one state no spec built. It has an
answer now, and the two ways to get this wrong land either side of it: reading
the stamp first says gone, reading held-ness without the liveness join says
connected.

Two comments claimed more than the code did. There IS a grace at which a live
worker is reported as gone, which is the point of it being a duration; and the
switch that reads held-ness first is only a partial second gate, since with the
SQL gate gone and a dead owner it answers gone rather than reconnecting.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 15:21:04 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 6b4ce58207 feat(cluster): answer presence with four values on the database clock
A worker whose tunnel is gone is not, by that fact, a worker that has left.
Absence is what makes the scheduler stop placing work, reap the worker's rows
and evict its models, and one of those paths runs during inference, so the
deployment needs to tell a worker re-homing between frontend replicas from one
that is really gone before anything acts.

Registry.Presence answers that in one joined statement, with four values and
not a boolean: unknown when there is no row at all (this package cannot tell a
worker that has never dialled from one whose departure aged out, and must not
guess), connected while a live replica holds the tunnel, reconnecting while the
departure is inside the grace, and gone once it is older. Only the last is a
verdict a caller may act on.

Held-ness is asked FIRST and the departure only refines it, in the SQL and
again in the switch that reads it. Every writer here clears disconnected_at in
the statement that writes the owner, but that is a property of these writers
rather than of the table: a replica running a binary from before the column
existed re-claims without clearing the stamp, so during a rolling upgrade a
held row carries an old departure, and a read that consults the stamp first
reports a connected worker as gone for the whole upgrade.

Both windows are computed by the database, for the reason every other window in
this package is: they are compared across replicas, and replicas disagreeing
about whether a worker is gone is the flapping this branch exists to remove. No
behavioural spec can see the difference, since the test container shares the
host clock, so the statement shape is pinned instead.

The grace is an operator's knob, defaulting to twice the worker tunnel's
maximum reconnect backoff. That made the fixed departure retention wrong: an
operator raising the grace past it gets a purge that deletes departures before
the grace elapses, so a worker that is gone reads as unknown forever and
nothing ever reaps it. The retention is now derived from the grace, with the
old constant as its floor.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 14:44:50 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 49e77447fb feat(cluster): record a departure instead of erasing the connection
Releasing a worker tunnel deleted its node_connections row, so "this
worker's link dropped a moment ago" and "this worker has never connected
here" were one observation: no row. Nothing above could tell a worker
re-homing between replicas from a worker that is gone, and any grace
period built on top would have had nothing to measure from.

The row now survives a departure. Release clears owner_instance_id and
stamps disconnected_at on the database clock; the membership sweep and
Deregister do the same for every connection a dead or departing replica
held; Claim clears the stamp in the same upsert that writes the owner, so
a reconnect is never observed half-applied. PurgeDepartedBefore deletes a
departure once it is older than DepartedRetention, and the membership
tick owns that schedule.

Owner and OwnerRow report a departed row as ErrNoConnection, through the
one predicate connectionIsHeld, the way instanceIsLive is the one
predicate for replica liveness. This change records the departure and
does not interpret it: how long ago it happened is nobody's answer yet.

The sweep only clears rows that are still held. An empty owner is in no
instance's id, so without that filter every heartbeat would restamp every
departed row and no departure could ever age out.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 12:03:55 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 6b712e76db fix(cluster): keep the refusal vocabulary in one table
The worker re-classified a failure a local service had already classified.
classifyServiceFailure preserved exactly one of the four refusal codes,
which was faithful to its own comment for as long as there was one worth
keeping; once ErrStreamNotServed existed, a service returning the code
whose whole job is to say "I learned nothing" had it promoted to
ErrStreamTargetUnavailable, which every reap guard acts on.
ErrStreamTagUnknown was promoted too, and cost nothing only because both
sides of that one reap. No in-tree service produces either, which is the
same "unreachable, therefore safe" argument that let the request-frame
merge survive a whole phase, and LocalService is exported.

The cause was a fifth site enumerating the vocabulary by hand, so the fix
is one table. streamRefusals pairs each sentinel with its wire code and
with whether a frontend may act on it as evidence about a backend, and the
writer, the reader, IsWorkerAnswer and the new IsStreamRefusal all read it.
A fifth code is now taught to every one of them at once.

The codes are also pinned against literals written out in a spec, the way
this branch already pinned the NATS vocabulary. The round-trip table
cannot see a rename, because a rename moves the writer and the reader
together; an unrecognised code is deliberately not the worker's answer, so
renaming "unavailable" would turn every crashed backend on a tunnelled
worker into a row nothing can ever reap, silently and with the suite green.

Three comments the previous fix falsified, corrected:

- tunnelHeaderTimeout still said the window bounds only framing the
  frontend writes immediately after opening the stream. That is true on the
  direct path and false on the relay path, and it was the argument for
  treating an expiry as the frontend's fault.
- classifyServiceFailure's deny-list is three causes, not two: on a dial
  error net.Error.Timeout also covers ETIMEDOUT and EAGAIN. Both are kept
  deliberately, because reaping a wedged or resource-starved backend is the
  eviction this phase exists to prevent, and ECONNREFUSED still reaps.
  isReadTimeout is renamed reportsTimeout, which is what it asks.
- The operator table named three refusals and said a refusal is acted on.
  It now lists four, with when each is sent and whether the row is reaped.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 06:10:26 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto c19ed5ab32 fix(cluster): stop a late request frame reading as the worker's verdict
Making a worker's refusal reaping evidence created a defect one layer
along, at the producer. The worker refused a ReadStreamRequest failure with
ErrStreamRequestInvalid and its own comment said "Includes the deadline
above expiring", which was harmless while every refusal reached the
frontend as "no route" and became a reap the moment one of them did not. So
a request frame that had merely not ARRIVED yet was reported as a
non-transient verdict about a backend.

It is reachable on the relay path, which carries most production traffic:
the worker's header timer starts when the OWNING replica opens the stream,
while the frame is written by the DIALLING replica only after the relay's
acceptance travels back to it, so a whole peer-link round trip runs inside
that window, on a link this design deliberately loads with multi-gigabyte
artifacts beside token streams. For a long-deadline caller the endpoint is
ConnectionEvictingClient, which stops the model across the fleet. It also
falsified the "neither clears on its own" argument that licensed the reap.

There is now a fourth refusal, ErrStreamNotServed, for what a worker could
not serve for a reason of its OWN. It is deliberately outside
IsWorkerAnswer, so it reaches a consumer under the no-route umbrella and
reaps nothing, which is the same treatment an unrecognised code already
gets. Four producers move onto it: a request frame that timed out (a
malformed one stays a verdict, because that is a frontend bug no retry
fixes), both SetReadDeadline failures, which are facts about the stream and
not about a target nothing has dialled yet, and WriteStreamRefusal's
default for a reason nobody classified.

classifyServiceFailure keeps ErrStreamTargetUnavailable as its default on
purpose: inverting it would make errno enumeration the single point of
failure for the reap, and a miss there is a row nothing can ever delete.
What it gains is a deny-list of two causes that are provably this worker's
own clock or its own context.

Also:

- The read-site caller-deadline guard in the handshake was unpinned: the
  existing seam spends the budget before the handshake starts, so only the
  write could ever fail. A spec whose deadline falls between the request and
  the reply pins it, and each guard now reddens on its own.
- The documented worker-first failure line omitted the JSON error envelope
  the old frontend returns, so an operator grepping it found nothing.
- The peer-link disclosure names the aimable per-session receive window in
  all four places, and LastDialErrorOf records why a third consumer must go
  through IsWorkerAnswer rather than roll its own list.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 04:48:25 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto d26263f9c0 fix(distributed): let a worker's own refusal be evidence about its backend
A worker that refuses a stream has answered, and cluster.Dial keeps the three
tunnelproto sentinels out of the ErrNoRoute umbrella precisely so a consumer
can act on that. No consumer did. Since workers stopped listening, a backend
process that crashed on a healthy worker is no longer a dead listener's
codes.Unavailable: the worker refuses the stream with
ErrStreamTargetUnavailable, gRPC flattens it into Unavailable anyway, and
nodes.unroutable reported the whole thing as "this frontend has no route".
Every reap path then answered ProbeUnknown and left the row, so the replica
slot never freed and at the default MaxReplicasPerModel=1 the only cleanup
left was LRU eviction of models that were working.

isWorkerAnswer is exported as cluster.IsWorkerAnswer, so the errors the dialer
keeps out of the umbrella are by construction the errors the consumers treat
as the worker answering. nodes.unroutable and pkg/model's transportFailure
both use it; ConnectionEvictingClient, the site reached during inference, goes
through transportFailure rather than asking the transport directly. A reply
code this frontend does not recognise is still not an answer, so a newer
worker's vocabulary costs a retry and not a replica.

The reap guards keep the allow-list rather than requiring ErrNoRoute: an
unrecognised dial error must mean "no route", never "the backend is gone".

Also in this final pass over the branch:

- Docs: recommend upgrading FRONTENDS first, with the symptom of each order.
  Workers-first fails now that a 4xx registration is a verdict rather than an
  outage, so an old frontend's "address is required for backend workers" makes
  each restarted worker exit and drains the fleet a node per restart.
- Docs: LOCALAI_WORKER_TUNNEL=false is a fatal startup error, not a degraded
  mode, in both places that described it; and a frontend rollback needs every
  worker restarted, because re-registration force-clears the address columns.
- A replica with no advertised address now says so every five minutes and
  names the workers only it can reach, instead of one startup warning for a
  cost paid for the life of the process.
- callerRanOut's rule now holds at all three siblings, so an expired caller
  deadline stops reading as a broken tunnel; probeHealth's withdrawn reason
  for using the raw client is corrected; the dead DoOrCached is deleted and
  its coverage kept on DoOrCachedResult; sweepLeakedInFlight enumerates the
  outcomes that reach it.
- The peer route's self-declared id is recorded as a phase-3 deferral, in the
  handler, in the isolation claim it narrows, and in the operator docs.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-02 00:59:36 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 0683fb1579 test(distributed): prove the worker tunnel end to end, under real inference
Everything this phase built was proven by unit and integration specs. This is
the first run of it against the real binaries: a frontend replica per process,
a worker that binds nothing routable, real inference over the result.

Four scenarios, each with the question "what would make this pass if the tunnel
were doing nothing" answered rather than left open.

A worker with no advertised address is reached through its tunnel. The roster
is asserted to report it advertising nothing, so there is no address a frontend
could have dialled instead, and node_connections is asserted to name the
replica that serves the request.

A request landing on the replica that does NOT own the worker is relayed to the
one that does. With N replicas behind round robin that is (N-1)/N of production
traffic, so it gets the FIRST request for its model: the backend install, the
file staging on the http tag, and the gRPC load and predict all cross the
relay. Which replica owns the tunnel is read from the ownership table through
the production Owner query and mapped to a frontend index through the address
the harness pins per replica; the non-owner is derived from that reading and
asserted to be a non-owner immediately before the request, rather than assumed
from the harness default. Sending the same request to the owner reddens it.

Killing the owning replica re-homes the worker onto the survivor. The worker
dials a balancer rather than a replica, because LOCALAI_REGISTER_TO is resolved
once at boot and is the tunnel endpoint as well as the registration one: aimed
at a single replica, a worker has nowhere to reconnect to when that replica
dies, and the re-home cannot happen at all. Removing the kill reddens it.

And the negative control for the whole suite, which is why the other three mean
anything. Frontend and worker share a host here, so every backend port the
frontend names in a stream target is one it could have dialled directly; if it
did, the first three would pass with the tunnel inert. LOCALAI_WORKER_TUNNEL is
no longer usable for this, because it is a fatal startup error and a worker that
never started says nothing about a worker reachable some other way. The balancer
answers the tunnel connect path itself instead, leaving a worker that registers,
heartbeats, reports healthy and holds no tunnel. It is asserted to have dialled
and been refused, asserted to be held by nobody, and then asserted unreachable
with the refusal naming the missing route. Then the block is lifted, nothing
else changes, and the same request succeeds: that is what attributes the refusal
to the tunnel rather than to any of the ordinary reasons an e2e inference fails.

The fifth spec measures the head-of-line blocking this phase deferred three
times. 128 MiB crosses the session while a warm model is probed back to back,
direct and relayed. Median latency is unchanged, the worst probe is about 3x the
baseline median and about a seventeenth of the transfer window, and the transfer
runs at 415-490 MB/s direct and 222-268 MB/s relayed. A session that
head-of-line blocked would park a probe for the length of the window. Leave the
yamux windows untuned; and note this is loopback, so it says the multiplexing
does not serialise and says nothing about a link with a bandwidth-delay product.

The load spec is measured against a control that the first version did not have.
It passed with the bulk artifact cut to 4 KiB, because the window it read probes
against was mostly cold-load overhead: it would have reported a clean bill on a
session carrying no large message. The same cold load now runs twice, once
empty and once bulk, and the difference between the windows is asserted to be
real before any latency is read from it.

Two defects on the base commit came out of this.

cluster_peerlink_test.go has been red since the relay landed, deterministically,
in isolation and in the suite. It asserted that an accepted peer stream is
refused at once, on the premise that phase 1 installs no relay. The relay
correctly waits fifteen seconds for a frame naming the worker, and the spec's
budget was five. It now writes a relay request for a node no replica holds and
asserts the refusal is ErrNotOwner and specifically not ErrNoConnection, which
is a stronger spec than the one it replaces and the only thing in the e2e suite
that exercises the relay's refusal path.

The harness handed a worker's own HTTP port to a backend process. It took two
ports from freeport and used one as the gRPC base and the other for the file
transfer server; freeport returns adjacent ports often, and the backend
allocator hands out base, base+1, base+2, so the second backend started on a
worker was regularly given the HTTP server's port and died with EADDRINUSE. No
spec had started two backends on one worker before, so it had never fired; the
load spec starts five and it failed about one run in three. Each worker now
reserves a contiguous bind-probed block laid out the way production lays it out,
below the kernel's ephemeral range, with LOCALAI_GRPC_MAX_PORT bounding the
allocator to it. The underlying production defect is not fixed here and is
recorded in the report: allocatePort never checks that a port is free, and its
default range overlaps the ephemeral range on every Linux box.

Constraint 6, whether distributed mode should now refuse to start without an
advertised address, is DEFERRED, and the comment and the docs that described the
cost were understating it. A replica with no advertised address writes no
instances row, and Owner joins a connection against a live instance, so a worker
whose tunnel lands there is unroutable from every OTHER replica while being
registered and healthy. Refusing to start would still be wrong, because the
deployments it would break are single-host ones with no peers to be unreachable
by, and telling those apart at startup is a design with its own specs. Both
places now say what actually happens.

Suite wall clock 592s for 15 specs, up from 502s for 10 of which 2 were red. The
CI budget of 20 minutes does not move.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 20:56:57 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 3338d7bc56 fix(distributed): refuse a worker that cannot tunnel, and say why it was refused
Review round 1 on the change that stopped workers listening. One blocking item
and seven notes.

LOCALAI_WORKER_TUNNEL=false was the blocking one, and the ruling was to make it
fatal rather than to correct the comment that still promised it fell back to the
advertised address. There is no fallback left: a worker on this branch
advertises nothing and binds only loopback, so turning the tunnel off leaves it
reachable by nothing while it registers, heartbeats and reports healthy, and the
scheduler keeps placing models on it. That is the worst available failure shape,
so a new Config.validateStartup refuses it before prefetch, registration and
NATS, while the worker is still invisible to the cluster. It absorbs the
pre-existing empty-registration-token check, which had the same shape and no
spec. The flag is kept rather than deleted so an operator who set it is told the
promise is gone instead of having the setting ignored, and the guard around
StartTunnel is removed, because a branch nothing can take reads as a supported
no-tunnel mode that does not exist.

The justification for erroring on an install that names no address was wrong,
and the review is right that this is the dangerous form of overclaiming, because
the conclusion holds and the mechanism does not. It said the resulting empty
target would be refused as an invalid stream and that the refusal would read as
the worker answering about its backend. Nothing in this repo branches on
cluster.ErrNoRoute, and nodes.unroutable treats any recorded dial error as
unroutable, so that refusal reaches every reap guard as ProbeUnknown and deletes
nothing. The site now stands on what holds, that an install naming no port
produced nothing routable and the failure belongs to the install rather than to
a later probe, and records the retracted claim so nobody re-derives it. This
retracts the same paragraph in the body of 1cf847f29.

The reviewer deleted the whole tryWarmPath unnamed-replica guard and the suite
stayed green, including the reservation release. It is specced now, and the
asymmetry the review asked about is decided at the site: the row stays, unlike
the sibling !alive branch which removes it. That branch has observed a backend
dead; this one has observed only that the row is unreadable, which says nothing
about whether a process is running, and the row is the last record that one
might be, since the acknowledged stop path refuses a stop whose ExpectedAddress
does not match and an empty one cannot be cleaned up through it either.

The cross-version wire claim rested on two struct tags nobody asserted:
renaming only the json keys survived mutation while the gorm column rename went
red through raw SQL. Both keys are pinned now, marshal and unmarshal, per
struct.

A worker-first upgrade showed the operator a status code and not the reason. The
registration client discarded the body, so "address is required for backend
workers" was read off the socket and thrown away, and the ladder then spent four
minutes on a verdict the frontend reached instantly. Refusals now quote the body
and carry ErrRegistrationRejected, and both the ladder and the credential
manager's Acquire stop on the first one. Acquire matters more than the ladder:
it is the default path and its bound is 100 attempts, not 10. 408 and 429 are
deliberately not refusals, since both are the frontend asking for the same
request again.

Also: the stale "not blocked by firewalls" troubleshooting line, which now names
the real cause and the knobs that move the port range; and the inert address
fields on the MCP Node DTO, which the Assistant was still being handed. The
review named http_address there and I removed address too, because it is inert
by the same argument and leaving one of a pair is arbitrary.

Five mutations, all red. Deleting the warm-path guard reddens four specs and
falsifying only its reservation release reddens one, so the two halves are
pinned separately. Renaming only the json keys reddens both wire suites.
Discarding the refusal body reddens two. Dropping the rejection classification
does not fail the suite, it hangs it, which is the operator-visible symptom, so
it is recorded red under a ginkgo timeout.

The verify list is now derived from the diff rather than from the brief, which
is what let the previous round ship a spec asserting 200 where the endpoint
returns 201: nine ginkgo suites, the e2e vet, route auth coverage, the leaf
check, build, the healthcheck shell suite and lint. The two jsx files have no
harness in this worktree and are recorded as the one unverified surface.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 19:36:35 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 1cf847f29e feat(distributed): stop workers listening, and stop them advertising
A worker now opens no listener on a routable interface and states no endpoint at
registration. Backend processes and the file-transfer server bind loopback, and
the frontend reaches both through the tunnel the worker dials. The bind address
is built from loopbackHost, the same constant the tunnel's grpc tag dials, so
"the worker binds where its tunnel dials" is one fact in one place rather than
two literals that can drift.

All three advertisement sites are closed, not one: the registration body,
RegisterNodeRequest, and the per-backend address in the install reply.

That third one was hiding a live bug. stopModelExact refuses a stop whose
ExpectedAddress does not match what the worker recorded for the process. The
worker recorded 127.0.0.1:port; handleBackendInstall reported advertiseHost:port;
the router stored the reported one and sent it straight back. On any worker whose
advertise host was not 127.0.0.1, every acknowledged model stop failed with an
address mismatch. Nothing caught it because the e2e harness set
LOCALAI_ADVERTISE_ADDR=127.0.0.1, which made the rewrite a no-op. Removing the
rewrite makes the two strings the same by construction.

The brief was wrong about two of the four functions it called dead.
effectiveBasePort is the base of the backend port allocator and resolveHTTPAddr
is the file server's bind address; deleting them would have deleted the port
allocator and the file server. Only the two advertise* helpers were dead, and
addr_test.go is rewritten rather than deleted, because the port arithmetic it
pinned still needs pinning.

NodeModel.Address survives with a narrowed meaning and is renamed
WorkerLocalAddress, along with the install reply field that feeds it. The
frontend still has to say WHICH backend process on a worker it means, and the
port in this string is how it says it: it travels as a stream target and the
worker dials its own loopback. The gorm column and the json key stay "address",
so neither a migration nor an API break rides along. Every fall-back to the
node's address is gone. installBackendOnNode now errors when a worker reports
success without naming one, because substituting the now-always-empty node
address would name an empty target, and the worker refuses that as an invalid
stream, which is classified as the worker answering about its backend. That is
the "a present worker reads as something it is not" class this phase forbids.

DistributedModelStore.Range had the same shape and was already wrong: it built
each remote model's client from the node's base gRPC port, never the port a
backend process listens on, so Free and Status went to the wrong place. It uses
the replica's address now.

BackendNode.Address and HTTPAddress are kept but made provably inert: no writer,
no reader that acts on them, and Register force-clears both on re-registration so
an upgraded worker's stale advertisement does not outlive its own upgrade in the
API and the Nodes page. Dropping the columns is a ~90-site edit across the specs,
the e2e suite, the MCP dto and the UI; it is recorded as a follow-up rather than
folded in here.

A persistent tunnel 401 still does not trigger re-registration, and now for a
reason rather than a deferral. Register CLEARS the node's replica rows, so
re-registering on a 401 would delete a live worker's rows on every retry, and
under the name collision that causes the 401 the two workers would take turns
doing it forever: a credential failure causing model reclamation. It also cannot
fix the named cause, since a collision is indistinguishable from a restart. The
401 log now names both causes and says nothing can reach this worker, which is
true only now that it has no listener.

The container healthcheck did not break the way the brief expected, since the
listener still exists on loopback and the probe runs inside the container. It did
have a real #10987 defect that this change makes the common case: it read
LOCALAI_SERVE_ADDR only, while effectiveBasePort reads LOCALAI_ADDR first, so a
worker on a non-default base port was probed on 50050 and reported unhealthy
while working. It follows the same precedence now.

Docs, the compose file and the e2e harness are updated in step: no inbound rule
or published port is needed for a worker, the two advertise variables are gone,
the remaining address variables are read for their port only, the
firewall-the-file-transfer-port warning is narrowed to the LOCALAI_HTTP_ADDR
opt-out, and the upgrade-order note no longer claims the worker still listens.
The Nodes page showed node.address, which is now always blank, so it shows the
node id instead.

Eight mutations, all red on a named spec, including reverting the loopback bind,
re-adding the address to the registration body, restoring both node-address
fall-backs, dropping the force-clear, storing the endpoint's address again, and
un-fixing the healthcheck. One of them caught a defect in a spec I had just
written: it asserted 200 where the endpoint returns 201, which went unnoticed
because core/http/endpoints/localai is not on the task's verify list. It is run
here.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 18:47:37 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto b4d8e23abb fix(grpc): let the transport answer through the wrappers, not only past gRPC
Re-review round 2. One blocking defect, and it was the concern I filed myself
last round and mis-scoped as a future trap. It was live, and it sat on the most
destructive reaping path of the five.

RouteResult.Client is an InFlightTrackingClient, over a FileStagingClient when a
stager is configured. model_router puts that on the cached remote model and
pkg/model's checkIsLoaded asks IT whether the transport failed. Both wrappers
embed grpc.Backend, which does not declare LastDialError, so the type assertion
read nil and the guard added last round fell straight through to the old
eviction. That eviction sends backend.stop over NATS to every node holding the
model and deletes every replica row, where the other sites delete one. The spec
covering it built a bare client by hand, which is why it passed while production
did not.

This is the third time in this task a correct fix was disarmed one layer out, so
the fix is a mechanism rather than two methods. BackendUnwrapper is one line per
decorator, LastDialErrorOf walks the chain, and both consumers now call it
instead of each keeping its own assertion. One implementation, no per-caller
policy to get wrong.

Sweeping every type that embeds or holds a grpc.Backend found a third decorator
the review had not named, and it is itself a reaping consumer of the same
collapsed signal. ConnectionEvictingClient is built for remote models in
initializers.go and its evict callback runs ShutdownModel; it fires during
INFERENCE rather than on a health check, so a tunnel blip mid-request was enough
to stop a model that was loaded and serving. It consults the transport first
now. A locally spawned backend has no custom transport, so that path is
unchanged byte for byte. Everything else touching a Backend is a consumer rather
than a decorator; there is no fourth.

The probe cache joiner shape is pinned. It was the right design last round with
nothing holding it: the mutation back to a closed-over variable passed all 602
specs in the package. Eight goroutines coalesced on a probe that blocks on a
channel now assert every joiner gets the leader's REASON and not just its
answer, which is the difference between a leader declining to reap and its seven
joiners reaping on the leader's own observation.

The LastDialError scope note claimed an exactness it does not have at
checkIsLoaded, which reads a shared long-lived client after releasing opMutex.
It now says which caller is not exact, why the imprecision is accepted there,
and what making it exact would cost.

The four-outcome table in the docs still said a worker with no live owner is
treated as absent and rescheduled, contradicting the code and the paragraph nine
lines below it. None of those outcomes is absence any more, and the table says
so, names the fifth, and points at the heartbeat as the thing that does decide
presence.

Five mutations, each reddening named specs, including the two the reviewer found
surviving.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 16:33:59 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto a8ac2af167 fix(cluster): make "no route" a condition of its own, and let it out of the package
Review round 1 on task 6. Five blocking findings, all with the same root: the
conditions the dialer kept apart were erased one layer out, because every one of
them arrived at core/services/nodes as a gRPC codes.Unavailable, which is also
what a backend process that died produces. Four call sites acted on that by
deleting a replica row, one of them after a single failed probe.

The fifth condition is ErrNoRoute: this replica could not get a request to a
worker's backend, and no claim at all about the worker. A worker's presence is
its HEARTBEAT, which nodes owns; a route is a separate fact that cluster owns,
and the two now differ. They differ in normal operation, not exotically: a
worker that has not dialled its tunnel yet after a frontend-first upgrade is
unroutable on every request while it heartbeats and serves.

Two properties, both mutation-tested. Every failure to resolve or open a route
carries ErrNoRoute, so a consumer has one check to make. No failure carries an
absence sentinel: routeFailure is the single place that rule lives, and it keeps
ErrNoConnection and ErrInstanceNotFound in the message and out of the unwrap
chain, the guarantee unreachableError already made for peers. Everything else
stays matchable, so ErrNotOwner and ErrPeerUnreachable are unchanged for anyone
who can act on them. A worker's own refusal carries no umbrella, because a
worker that answers has demonstrated it is there and that is the only real
evidence on the path.

Crossing the boundary needed a value, not a code. NewClientWithDialer wraps the
dialer and records each outcome; LastDialError hands it back behind a narrow
interface, and nodes.unroutable turns it into ErrWorkerUnroutable with the
cluster sentinels still in the chain. A spec asserts a dial failing with
ErrNoRoute plus ErrPeerUnreachable arrives matching all three and matching
neither absence sentinel.

The sweep found a fourth site the review had not named: pkg/model checkIsLoaded
evicts a remote model on a connection error, and a tunnel dial failure is one.
Four other reap sites were cleared with reasons - inflight and the worker
authoritative pass reap only on semantic answers, scale-down is driven by
last_used, abandoned loads decide on the node's heartbeat. Every fixed site also
grew the opposite spec, so the new check cannot pass by never reaping.

probeCache carries the reason through singleflight rather than a closed-over
variable. A variable is only written by the goroutine that runs the probe, so
the leader would correctly decline to reap while every joiner reaped on the
leader's own observation; a mutation reproduces exactly that.

The docs sentence promising LOCALAI_WORKER_TUNNEL=false restores direct dialling
is gone. There is no such path, so it said the operator could take a worker dark
and call it a rollback. Replaced with the upgrade order that is actually safe.

The deadline spec the reviewer found vacuous now waits on the dial context's own
Done channel before touching the stream, so the armed deadline has really
expired; the mutation that survived for the reviewer reddens it.

Nine mutations, each reddening a named spec, including both halves of
isAbsenceClaim independently.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 16:09:26 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 75953d9f63 feat(cluster): reach every worker through its tunnel, never its address
The tunnel, the fence, the registry and the relay were all built and none of
them carried a byte: every dial from the frontend still went to the address a
worker registered. This is where that stops. One WorkerDialer resolves where a
worker's tunnel is held, opens a stream on it locally or relays through the
owning replica, and hands back a conn past both handshakes; gRPC, the file
stager's HTTP client and the log-streaming WebSocket are all pointed at it.

A worker's address stops being somewhere to connect to and becomes the name of
which backend process a stream is for. It still appears in URLs, logs and
errors, because that is what identifies the process; what it no longer decides
is where the bytes go.

Nothing falls back to dialling it. BackendClientFactory now has exactly one
method, NewClientForNode, and returns an error where there is no way to reach
the worker. The direct-dial constructor was removed rather than kept beside it,
because leaving one on the interface keeps the bypass one word away from every
call site that holds an address, which is all of them.

The second construction path is closed too. DistributedModelStore built remote
models with a nil client, and pkg/model.Model.GRPC then dialled the raw address
lazily on first use - reached in production by ShutdownModel's Free and by the
backend monitor's Status. Those models now carry the tunnel-backed client, and
a model that cannot be given one is logged and not listed.

Four conditions stay unmixable, and one path produces absence: the dialer
answers ErrNoConnection only where Owner's liveness join did. A peer that will
not answer, a stale ownership row, a worker's own refusal and a missing relay
path are each reported as themselves. This matters because nodes ACTS on
absence, and the collapse would have it reclaim the models of a worker that is
connected and busy.

That is not hypothetical. Writing the mutation for it exposed the bug in this
change's own first draft: probeHealth returned bare false when it could not
build a client, and tryWarmPath deletes the replica row on a false probe. A
frontend whose dialer broke would have emptied node_models for the whole
deployment while every model kept running. probeHealth now returns alive and
probed separately, the reconciler gets a ProbeUnknown outcome that neither
advances nor clears a failure streak, and the health monitor skips rather than
counting a miss.

Task 5 left the relay's open timeout at a fixed 15s and said so: no operator
has the information to set it, because the number that matters is the original
client's remaining budget, which is invisible on the relay side. The dialer has
that budget, so it now states it in the relay request frame and the owner takes
the smaller of the two. It can only shorten - a patient client must not be able
to park a relay goroutine and a stream slot on a worker that stopped accepting.
Zero is written as no budget at all, since on the far side the number zero is a
caller with nothing left and would refuse healthy traffic.

Seven mutations, each reddening a named spec: peer-unreachable as absence; the
local-failure guard dropped; max instead of min on the budget; the nil-client
model restored; ProbeUnknown falling through to the reaper; OwnerRow instead of
Owner; probed collapsed into alive. The first budget spec passed for the wrong
reason - a handshake deadline, not the relay - and was replaced by three that
each assert one link, including one where the spec plays the owning replica and
reads the budget out of the frame instead of inferring it from a clock.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 15:27:10 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 5108be222d fix(worker): spec the tunnel's routing table, which was the SSRF boundary
Review follow-up. One blocking finding and seven others.

The blocking one first, and it is this project's recurring shape: the untested
path. loopbackService is the function whose comment calls the discarded host
"the security property this function exists for", and nothing tested it. The
reviewer replaced its body with a dial of whatever the frontend named, no port
range, and all 131 specs passed. Every spec installed the permissive test
dialler, so the real routing table was exercised nowhere.

It now has specs, and the property is stated as reachability rather than as a
property of the code: a listener on 127.0.0.2 that only the frontend's target
names must NOT be reached. Plus the port-range table, fixedService, loopbackAddr,
tunnelEndpoint, and the table itself, which moved out of Run into tunnelServices
so it can be built without starting a worker. One spec drives a real stream
through that table over the wire, so the routing rules are exercised end to end
at least once rather than only in isolation. The reviewer's mutation now reddens
ten specs, and six narrower ones redden between two and four each, so no spec is
riding on another.

The shape changed too, not only the coverage. The dial address is built from a
loopbackHost constant and strconv.Itoa of a validated int, so nothing derived
from the wire reaches DialContext at all: restoring the hole takes ADDING a data
flow, not deleting a check.

And a taxonomy fix found while specifying it. A port outside this worker's
allocator range was reported as unavailable, which tells a frontend to retry
something that can never work. It is a bad request now, and a backend that is
merely not listening yet stays unavailable, which is the retryable one.

Agent nodes no longer get a tunnel credential. Nothing dials into an agent
worker, so a tunnel replaces nothing for it and no client would open one, and
the gate is at the mint site rather than in the handler: with no credential
minted the hash stays empty and the existing empty-hash refusal covers it, so
enforcement is structural.

Two comments and one doc paragraph said an anonymous registrant gets a "working"
credential. With auto-approve off the node is pending and the credential is
inert, which is the distinction this same change argues three files away to
justify minting for pending nodes at all.

A refusal reason over the frame limit was cut on a byte boundary and could split
a rune. It cuts on a rune boundary now, and the code survives truncation, which
is what keeps a refusal classifiable.

Also: the pending-node spec asserted only that a credential was non-empty, so a
credential derived from the shared token passed it; it now pins per-node-ness the
way the headline spec does. The tunnel handler's citations into nodes.go were
stale before this branch landed, having been written against a file the same
commit was editing, and are by function name now. The static-NATS path says
plainly that an externally forced rotation locks it out until restart, and where
that gets fixed. tunnelproto gained direct specs, including that a read failure
is never reported as a refusal.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
2026-09-01 13:03:54 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 29a2020f3d feat(worker): dial, hold and serve the tunnel, on a credential of its own
The worker end of the tunnel. It dials wss://<register-to>/api/cluster/connect,
holds one yamux session as the CLIENT, and serves every stream the frontend
opens on it. Nothing dials into the worker, which is the point: no inbound port,
no reachable address.

Each stream opens with a length-prefixed frame naming a tag and a target, and
the worker answers before either side speaks the tunnelled protocol. The reply
is sent on every stream, not only on refusal, because the protocols carried here
are client-speaks-first and a reply sent only sometimes would arrive interleaved
with a response body. Two tags today: grpc reaches a backend process, and only
on 127.0.0.1 within this worker's own backend port range, because a tunnel
terminates inside the worker and letting the frontend name a host would make
every worker a proxy into its own LAN; http reaches the worker's file-transfer
server, whose address the frontend is not asked about.

An unknown tag, an unreachable local service and an unparseable request are
three refusals and stay three on the wire. A frontend gives up on the first and
retries the second. Each is answered AND the stream is ended: a worker that says
why and leaves the stream open has parked the caller on a request nobody will
answer, and a deadline on the far side cannot tell that from a slow worker. The
specs assert the stream ends rather than that an error occurred, which is what
phase 1 shipped in three places and held in none.

Reconnects double from 500ms to a 30s ceiling, each wait drawn between half the
interval and all of it, and the interval returns to its floor only after a
session that LASTED. Resetting on connect is how a rolling restart, where every
dial succeeds and dies moments later, becomes a retry storm against the first
replica back up. Nothing is assumed to survive a reconnect: the credential is
read at dial time, never captured.

And the credential is now real. The tunnel endpoint advertised authenticating a
worker against its own secret, but registration stored the hash of the shared
registration token, so a leak plus a known node ID still opened a tunnel.
Registration now mints a per-node secret, returns the plaintext once as
tunnel_token, and stores only its SHA-256 in a new column; the endpoint compares
against that and does not fall back to the old one. Rotating on every
registration follows from storing only the hash, since a re-registering worker
cannot be told the secret it already holds; its live tunnel is unaffected,
because the credential is checked when a tunnel is dialled and never again.

Unlike the agent API key and the NATS JWT next to it, the credential IS issued
to a node awaiting approval: the tunnel route re-reads the node's status on
every dial and refuses a pending one, so it is inert until an admin acts, and
withholding it would strand every worker that registers exactly once.

A node that has not registered since this change cannot tunnel, and the column
cannot be back-filled because the plaintext only ever existed in the response
that minted it. The boot warning that said tunnels need LOCALAI_REGISTRATION_TOKEN
is replaced: it was true while the tunnel authenticated against that token's
hash, and says the wrong thing now. What is still true, and is what it warns
about instead, is that without one, registration itself is unauthenticated.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 12:28:00 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 48ece89c63 fix(cluster): harden the worker tunnel, and stop starting a database per spec
Review follow-up. Twelve findings, none blocking, grouped here by what they
protect.

Panics. The handler now recovers between the WebSocket upgrade and the
hand-off, the way the peer link next door already did: net/http recovers the
panic but leaves the hijacked socket open, so without this a worker keeps a
session this replica has no entry for and will never detach. The claim gate in
Attach and reclaimOne is now released with defer, so a panic under Claim cannot
wedge one node's gate for the life of the process. SetTunnels gained the
nil-receiver guard its sibling Stop has.

Operability. A deployment with no registration token stores an empty token_hash
on every worker, so every tunnel dial 401s forever on a frontend that looks
correctly configured. That now warns at startup, logs its own line rather than
sharing the "wrong token" one, and is stated in the docs together with the fact
that setting the token later needs the workers to register again.

Authorization. A node still awaiting admin approval is refused with 403. The
rest of /api/node/ gates on nothing, but the two places that hand a node
something durable, its API key and its NATS credential, both refuse a pending
one, and a tunnel is that kind of grant. Draining and unhealthy nodes keep
their tunnels on purpose.

Comments that claimed more than the code. The global auth middleware does run
on this path and then declines to reject; the future per-node secret only lands
without a change here if it lands in TokenHash; the empty-hash guard is
defensive rather than deciding; ClusterPathPrefix is no longer only
replica-to-replica; the docs no longer say a reaped replica re-claims
unconditionally.

And the test harness. SetupTestDB started a PostgreSQL container per BeforeEach
with a readiness deadline it asserted on, which is one chance per spec to fail
one spec inside its setup, anywhere, never twice in the same place: the shape of
the flake seen twice here and never reproduced. It now starts one container per
process and creates a database per call, which is the pattern tests/e2e already
proved. Isolation is unchanged and is now asserted for the first time. All 69
call sites are untouched; the eleven consumer packages run 1404 specs green, and
jobs went from 34.3s to 3.3s, agents from 13.8s to 1.9s, cluster from 97.4s to
37.5s.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
2026-09-01 10:36:10 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 6e55092a4b feat(cluster): open the door a worker dials its tunnel through
A worker needs no inbound port: it dials GET /api/cluster/connect, the
connection becomes one multiplexed yamux session, and the frontend opens a
stream on it per request. This adds the endpoint that accepts that dial and
attaches it to the tunnel registry.

The dial is authenticated against the NODE's own stored token hash rather than
the deployment's registration token. That is the mechanism, not yet the
isolation, since a worker still registers by presenting the shared token; what
it rules out is the shortcut of comparing against the configured value, which
would have to be unpicked the day workers get their own secrets.

Every refusal happens BEFORE the WebSocket upgrade, so a dialer reads an HTTP
status rather than a handshake error. The route is registered in every
deployment, single-binary ones included, which is what puts it in front of the
route-coverage test that holds that rule in place; with no node registry it
refuses every dial, and tells a credentialed one the frontend has no cluster
rather than that its token is wrong.

A lookup that FAILED is answered as a failure. Reporting a database that could
not be read as "unauthorized" would send a worker re-registering, throwing away
the identity its tunnel and loaded models are keyed by.

Wires the tunnel registry in core/application/distributed.go and hands it to
the membership loop. Without that call the re-claim after a replica is reaped
had no production caller and could never run.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
2026-09-01 09:42:41 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto aca383d263 feat(cluster): give phase 1 a call site, and prove it against real replicas
Tasks 1 to 5 built an instances table, a splice, both halves of a peer link
and an epoch fence, and nothing in the tree called any of it: no replica
registered, no route was mounted, no sweeper ran. Proving phase 1 end to
end therefore had to start by wiring it.

A frontend in distributed mode now publishes the address its peers dial,
heartbeats it, and sweeps replicas that stopped answering along with the
connection rows they owned, in one pass so the two can never disagree about
who is alive. It serves the peer link and owns the sessions peers dial in,
refusing streams on them until phase 2 installs a relay: a session nobody
accepts on does not fail a peer's Open, it hangs it.

The address is the one peers use, not the one the process binds, and it is
derived from the route to PostgreSQL. That derivation only holds while the
database is remote, so LOCALAI_DISTRIBUTED_ADVERTISE_ADDR sets it
explicitly and a replica that can determine neither warns and keeps
serving rather than failing to start.

Three e2e scenarios run against real local-ai processes, real PostgreSQL
and real dials: replicas publish addresses that can actually be connected
to; a sibling opens a stream over the peer link and is refused without the
cluster token; and a killed replica is reported unreachable, never absent,
loses the claim it held, and takes no worker with it. Each was verified by
mutation: eight injected defects, each failing the scenario that claims to
catch it.

Also moves RegisterClusterRoutes to core/http/routes beside every other
registrar, folds AutoMigrate and the epoch sequence into one
cluster.Migrate, and turns the peer route's auth-coverage spec into a real
assertion: it drives the request through the actual auth middleware
instead of comparing two string constants, which the old spec would have
passed even with the exemption deleted.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 02:28:42 +00:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 7aeb47cbf3 fix(launcher): auto-start the server so launching the app actually serves
Fixes #11673: on macOS the DMG launcher appeared to launch nothing. After
installing, the app sat in the menu bar with no window, nothing listening
on localhost:8080, and empty log files, because nothing ever started the
server unless the unrelated 'start on system boot' option was enabled.

- Start the LocalAI server automatically when the launcher opens and right
  after a fresh install. The new auto_start_server config key defaults to
  enabled and gets a settings checkbox; the legacy auto_start key was never
  honored nor exposed, so every existing launcher.json carries an
  unintentional false and is deliberately left behind.
- Fix the welcome window suppressing itself: its 'don't show this again'
  checkbox was initialized with the inverted value, and SetChecked fired
  the change callback which persisted ShowWelcome=false on the very first
  showing.
- Surface auto-start failures through the systray startup-error dialog,
  since there is no visible window during auto-start.
- Pass --app-version to fyne package so the app stops reporting itself as
  version 0.0.0 in the About box.
- Document the first-launch flow (menu bar app, auto-start, WebUI URL) in
  the macOS getting-started page.
- Repair two launcher specs that never ran in CI: a *bool matched against
  BeTrue and a /tmp assertion that trips on Linux where the test tempdir
  itself lives under /tmp.

Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-08-30 21:45:59 +00:00
localai-org-maint-botandlocalai-org-maint-bot 893a45141c fix(realtime): accept GA WebRTC signaling (#11778)
OpenAI GA clients send multipart or raw SDP requests. They expect a bare
SDP answer. LocalAI only accepted its legacy JSON envelope, so signaling
failed before media setup.

Keep the JSON contract for existing clients. Accept both GA request
shapes and choose the matching response format.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5

Co-authored-by: localai-org-maint-bot <306269227+localai-org-maint-bot@users.noreply.github.com>
2026-08-29 21:28:37 +02:00
mudler's LocalAI [bot]andEttore Di Giacinto 80e3240f2d feat(distributed): key scheduling rules by a model alias (#11771)
Node placement and replica rules could only name a model, so an operator
who pinned "llama3" to the GPU tier had to rewrite the rule whenever a
different model took over that job. An alias already gives a stable name
for whichever model serves it, and a rule on that name makes it a
deployment slot: repoint the alias and the placement follows.

A rule keeps the name the operator chose. Reads resolve that name through
the config loader to the model the rule governs, so the reconciler counts,
schedules and trims replicas of the target, and the router finds an
alias-keyed rule from the target it is already routing. An alias that
resolves to nothing governs nothing loadable, so the reconciler skips it
and the write paths refuse it.

A replica is shared by every name that resolves to it, so only one rule
can decide where it runs. The REST and MCP write paths reject a rule whose
target another rule already governs. A pair that arrives some other way,
such as a seed file or an alias repointed onto a model that already has a
rule, resolves in favour of the rule named after the model itself and then
the oldest, and the rest are listed as shadowed.

The eviction guard is the exception: it matches rules to replicas in raw
SQL inside a locking transaction and cannot resolve an alias. It reads a
stored target that the reconciler refreshes each tick, and falls back to
the rule's own name when that target is empty.


Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 golangci-lint eslint

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-08-29 09:16:50 +02:00
mudler's LocalAI [bot]andEttore Di Giacinto 29899cd1e0 fix(ui): size model fit against the cluster and move node labels into the selector (#11765)
* fix(ui): move node labels into the scheduling selector field

The scheduling page kept a node-label browser open above the rules
whether or not anyone was writing one, while the field that actually
needs labels, the rule's node selector, was two bare text inputs with no
hint of what the cluster reports.

The browser is gone. The selector's key input now completes against the
label keys the cluster uses, and the value input offers only the values
that key takes. The roster already loads for the page, so the
suggestions cost no request, and a roster that fails to load costs the
admin the hints and nothing else.

Suggestions stay suggestions: a key no node reports yet still commits as
typed, which is how an admin writes a rule before labelling the nodes
for it.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 golangci-lint eslint playwright
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>

* fix(distributed): size model fit against the cluster, not the frontend

The models page asked the frontend how much memory a model may occupy.
In distributed mode the frontend is usually a GPU-less pod while every
model runs on a worker, so a fleet of GPU nodes was told it could only
run the smallest CPU build. The variant picker's fits flag and its
auto-selection came from the same place, as did the hardware
recommendations.

The registry now reports the largest single healthy backend node. The
largest node, not the fleet total: a model loads into one node, so four
16GB workers are not a home for a 40GB model. An operator-set VRAM
budget caps a node's contribution, because the scheduler refuses a load
above that ceiling anyway, and a GPU node beats a CPU node holding more
system RAM.

GET /api/resources and GET /api/models carry this as an additional
cluster object. Their aggregate and ram fields keep reporting the
frontend's own hardware, which is what the resource monitor shows.
Variant selection judges backends against the union of the capabilities
present in the cluster, the way backend discovery already did.

Every path degrades to the local host: no cluster object in single-node
mode, and none when the registry cannot be read, so a hiccup narrows the
answer back to single-node behaviour rather than marking the whole
catalog too large.

The verdicts now name the node they belong to, since a model fits
somewhere or nowhere.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 golangci-lint eslint playwright
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>

---------

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-08-28 22:57:35 +02:00
localai-org-maint-botandlocalai-org-maint-bot d85577ff5c docs: add Apache APISIX reverse proxy example (#11294)
docs: add APISIX reverse proxy example

Document the route settings needed for forwarded headers, streaming responses, and long-running inference behind Apache APISIX.

Closes #11215

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5

Co-authored-by: localai-org-maint-bot <306269227+localai-org-maint-bot@users.noreply.github.com>
2026-08-28 08:51:38 +02:00
Ettore Di Giacinto 3953448f60 fix(distributed): resync stored config revisions at startup
The controller pins a model's replicas to a stored revision and rejects
any request carrying a different one. Nothing ever re-derived that value
from the configuration on disk: it moved only on an edit, a gallery
install, or a peer's change broadcast. An inference request may only
establish a revision, never replace one.

So any other way for the two to diverge left the model permanently
unroutable. A configuration edited while a frontend was down lands
there, and so does a change in what the revision is computed over: an
upgrade that alters the hashed form leaves every stored revision
describing a configuration that no longer exists. The only recovery was
deleting the row by hand, which is not something a cluster should need.

Each frontend now reconciles the stored revisions against the loaded
configurations at startup and republishes the ones that disagree. Only
those: republishing quarantines every replica loaded under the old
revision, so doing it for a model that did not drift would unload a
healthy replica for nothing. A model with no stored revision has never
been served and is left for its first request to establish.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [golangci-lint]
2026-08-23 22:17:59 +00:00