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LocalAI/core/application
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
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