Commit Graph
22 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 cd7eedf09e Give the mirror a page, so managing it is not a curl command
/admin/mirror, behind the same admin session as the other admin pages. What is
held, what is arriving with its byte count, what failed and why; start a fetch,
retry a failed one, remove a version.

Not mounted at all without a mirror configured. The right page for a deployment
with no mirror is no page, rather than an empty one pointing at nothing.

It reloads itself only while something is downloading. A reload at any other
moment takes with it whatever is half-typed into the fetch form, and there is
nothing to watch when nothing is moving.

A failed row offers Retry, not Remove. A fetch that failed left nothing on disk,
so the remove could only answer "the mirror holds nothing for this" — a button
whose single outcome is a confusing error. Starting the same download again is
what somebody looking at that row wants, and the mirror allows it: only a
download still running is refused.

An unreachable mirror is said outright instead of rendering as an empty table.
The two look nearly identical and mean opposite things: one is a mirror waiting
to be filled, the other is a machine to go and look at.

Dashboard takes NavExtras rather than a second bool. Two adjacent booleans at a
call site get swapped silently and are discovered by somebody clicking the
wrong link.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 10:17:12 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 afb3797e57 Document the mirror that exists rather than the one you assemble
The page described nginx and a curl loop, which was accurate when the mirror
was a directory somebody kept by hand. It is a subcommand now, so it says so:
the two listeners and why they are two, the API and what each endpoint answers,
and the certificates coming from the authority the fleet already has.

nginx stays, further down. It serves a directory perfectly well and anyone
already running it should not be told to install something to replace it.

The systemd unit spells out --base in a comment because it is the flag that
goes wrong quietly: it ends up in catalog entries, and a wrong one makes
`mirror unused` call files unreferenced while they are in use.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 09:43:02 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 e86457cf02 Make the model mirror a file you can copy, not an idea you have to have
"Set up a local mirror" was advice. This is the nginx config, the directory
layout and the reason the layout has a date in it — a repository that changes
upstream changes what you are running, and the first sign is a prompt that
worked last week answering differently this week.

It says what the mirror is not, because both mistakes are easy. It is not a
caching proxy: nothing populates it on demand, deliberately, since a mirror
that reaches the internet at the least convenient moment fails in a way that
looks like llmgw being broken. And it is not needed at all if you already run
a shared filesystem — put the models there, use a path, and nothing is fetched.

It also says when a mirror stops being enough, and that llmgw is positioned to
distribute between nodes because it already knows which of them hold which
weights. That is not built, and the page says so rather than implying it is
coming.

Every behaviour it relies on was checked against the source: an http:// source
is fetched and a path is not, a killed download resumes, a partial file is
never visible under the model's name, and a shared filesystem is not counted
once per node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 08:20:50 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 2bf7de1a43 Give two control planes a shared address, and a probe that means something
The last piece of HA, and it is a deployment pattern rather than code: llmgw
picks one leader and agents follow it, but client traffic arrives in front of
both and llmgw is not in front of anything.

Writing the pattern found a bug in the pattern. The first draft said to
health-check `/health` and claimed a standby still routes to replicas the
leader placed, so sending it traffic was fine. It does not. A standby's
reconciler places nothing and it holds no agent streams to adopt from, so it
publishes an empty endpoint list — a load balancer following that advice would
have sent half the traffic to something that answers every request with 503.

So there is now a `/ready` that means "this process has somewhere to send a
request": 503 on a standby, 503 on a leader whose replicas have all failed,
200 when there is something to serve. `/health` keeps meaning the process is
up, which is a different and less useful question. Both are open, because a
load balancer has no key.

There is a gap during failover where neither passes — three seconds when the
leader stops cleanly, up to the lease TTL when it does not — and the document
says so rather than implying otherwise. Traffic cannot go to a control plane
that has nothing to route to.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 07:52:54 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 1ea067d08e Give metrics a door that does not also open onto pprof
The metrics existed and nothing could record them. They shared a listener
with pprof, the management API and the dashboard, and pprof can dump the
process heap where API keys sit in plaintext — so a fleet could be monitored
or keep its heap private, and not both. That is not a choice anyone should
have to make, and it is why every previous answer to "how do I scrape this"
was a tunnel.

metrics_listen serves metrics and health and nothing else, so it can be
reached from wherever Prometheus lives. Metrics stay on the admin listener
too: adding a door is not the same as moving one, and anything already
scraping keeps working.

While there: admin_listen defaulted to :9090, every interface, with a
comment beside it saying not to expose it. A default that contradicts its
own documentation is a footgun, so it is loopback now and someone who wants
otherwise says so.

The handler is nil until the registry is built, and says so rather than
serving an empty page. Ordering has already caught this exact area once —
a collector registered after AdminHandler published nothing at all, silently
— and an empty scrape target looks like a working one.

deploy/monitoring/prometheus.yml has a starting configuration and the alerts
worth having: a node that has stopped reporting, a model that should be
serving and is not, a card kept out of placement by a fault, and a fleet
holding models nobody is asking for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-17 18:12:10 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 c13c567cc5 Know where the weights are, without owning the storage
Storage will be different at every installation — Lustre, NFS over RDMA, an
image exported with SRP or NVMe-oF, local NVMe, an rsync — so llmgw observes
it rather than managing it. An agent told which directories to look in
reports what it can see; how the files got there is nobody's business here,
and a node told nothing reports nothing and behaves exactly as every node
did before this existed.

That fact buys two things. Placement prefers a node that already holds the
model over one that must first move tens of gigabytes, as a preference and
never a filter: fetching them is a valid answer, and refusing to place would
turn a slow start into no start at all. And ctl status shows what each
fabric holds.

Per fabric because fabrics are not connected to one another. Weights in
ib-a are not weights in ib-b — the only path between them is the management
network — so a model seeded into one fabric leaves the rest of the cluster
unable to serve it without a slow copy, and nothing said so before now. One
shared filer counts the same as twenty local copies, because "can this
fabric serve it" is the question being asked.

Three distinctions the tests hold to, because each is a way to get this
quietly wrong. A node that was never asked to look must rank with one that
looked and has nothing, or enabling the feature on a single node would
drain every other. An empty directory is not weights, because a
half-finished download looks exactly like one and would send placement to a
node whose engine then fails to load. And local storage is never mistaken
for shared: a filer read as local costs an unnecessary copy, while local
read as shared would have the cluster believe a model is everywhere when it
is on one node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-17 08:21:16 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 634f87ba15 Provision nodes with the host CPU model
Proxmox defaults a VM to kvm64, which hides AVX, AVX2, FMA and even SSE4.2
from the guest. llama.cpp then loads libggml-cpu-x64.so — its scalar
baseline — instead of the backend built for the host's instruction set, and
an inference node is not slightly slower but unusable.

Measured on node05, an 8-core VM on a Xeon E5-2680 v4, same weights, same
thread count, the only change being --cpu host:

  Qwen2.5-Coder     kvm64   host
  1.5B q4_K_M        5.80  39.09  tok/s
  3B   q4_K_M        2.90  20.51
  7B   q4_K_M        1.33   9.88

Prompt processing went from 7.6 to 143.8, a factor of nineteen.

This cost an afternoon because nothing looks broken. The node registers, the
engine starts, the replies are correct; every number is just small, and the
conclusion that suggests itself is that CPU inference is hopeless rather
than that the VM cannot multiply efficiently. A 14B model at 1.7 tokens a
second was nearly written off on that basis.

The trade is live migration, which a VM pinned to the host CPU cannot do.
For a node whose job is arithmetic that is the right way round, and --cpu
overrides it where it is not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 20:42:48 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 aa4da3264d Make adding a node one command, and check the engine actually runs
Building node05 by hand turned up three things worth fixing, in the order
they bit.

Onboarding died on "Host key verification failed" — an error about ssh, in
the middle of a script whose entire job is to talk to a machine created
sixty seconds ago. It now uses accept-new, which learns an unknown host key
and still refuses a changed one; the risk being guarded against is a
substituted machine, not a new one.

Then ssh started refusing connections on a node that had answered a moment
before: cloud-init regenerates the host keys and restarts sshd partway
through a new machine's first minute. The agent was registered and healthy
throughout. Onboarding now waits for ssh rather than failing on it, which
is also what makes running the two halves back to back safe.

Then llama-server: present, executable, and unable to start for want of
libgomp1. The node registered ready and would have stayed ready until a
replica was placed on it and the shard died with a missing shared library
three logs away. The docs already warned about this shape of failure;
nothing checked for it. Onboarding now runs a configured engine and says
plainly when it will not start.

add-node.sh drives both halves. The reason is not keystrokes: the VM name,
the hostname, the node id and the certificate's CN must all be the same
string, and the address appears in three places. Split across two commands
run minutes apart, that agreement is held together by whoever is typing.
Here it is stated once, and the VMID defaults to the last octet of the
address so qm list and ctl nodes stay in the same order. The two halves
remain separately runnable, because needing the hypervisor and needing the
CA really are different access.

Verified by building a throwaway node06 with it: 45 seconds from nothing to
registered, and the engine check caught that node06 had no llama-server.
Destroyed afterwards.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 19:07:56 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 5b425c32e5 Ship binaries with releases, and ask engines whether our flags still exist
A release was a git tag. Installing llmgw on a node meant having a Go
toolchain, and the onboarding script copied a binary from wherever it was run —
which works and quietly makes whoever runs it the build server, with the fleet
ending up on whatever was in their working tree. Tags now build static
linux/amd64, linux/arm64 and darwin binaries and attach them. CGO_ENABLED=0 is
the point: it has to run on a node whose libc is older than the builder's, and
llmgw has no C dependency because modernc.org/sqlite is pure Go precisely so
this stays true. Verified: "not a dynamic executable", runs on a node, reports
its version.

`ctl engine-check` closes the other half of the phase 4 gap. llmgw's launch
arguments are read from each engine's documentation, and engines rename flags
between versions; when that happens the failure arrives minutes into a model
load, in the engine's own error message, on a node nobody was watching. It
builds the widest command llmgw would ever produce — multi-node, since a flag
that only appears there is the one nobody notices has gone — and checks each
flag against the engine's own --help. No GPU: a CLI prints its help anywhere.
Verified against llama.cpp b10991, all seven flags accepted.

Flags are matched on a word boundary, so --port is not satisfied by
--port-range. Without that, a renamed flag would sail through the check that
exists to catch renamed flags.

It also warns when the help text looks truncated, which is how the first run
went: llama.cpp's help cut to 400 of its 725 lines reported five flags as
missing that the running cluster uses.

TestSidecarRunsBeforeEngine was flaky under a full run, and worse than flaky —
its wait loop fell through on timeout, so a slow machine turned the ordering
assertion into a no-op and the failure surfaced later as something else. It now
asserts, with a deadline that suits a machine running every other package at
the same time.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 16:44:29 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 7b4acd9284 A replica missing a shard is not ready
Restarting the control plane over a running two-node replica adopted half of
it. Every shard it still had was healthy, so it was reported Ready — with one
shard of two and no endpoint at all, because the missing one was rank 0. The
router was handed a replica nothing could route to.

The cause is that a replica had no idea how many shards it should have. It
could tell "every shard I have is ready" and nothing else, which is the same
sentence whether or not half of it is gone. It now carries the count from its
profile, set at placement and again at adoption, and a replica short of shards
fails rather than pretending.

Onboarding also wrote no engine paths, so a node onboarded by the script could
not find llama-server and failed every shard placed on it with "executable
file not found". The script now takes them, and says so when none are given —
a node with no engine paths can run the sim engine and nothing else.

The cluster now runs both at once: two-node simulated replicas on each fabric,
and real llama.cpp inference on the CPU, which is a better test bed than
either alone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 12:43:51 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 c97b671ef9 Prove the multi-node path on a simulated cluster
Phase 4 had been written and never run. The hardware is not coming, so the
cluster is simulated instead — four nodes across two fabrics, eight GPUs each,
built with the onboarding scripts from the previous commit.

`sim` is now an engine adapter, not just a standalone command. Its leader binds
a rendezvous port and does not serve until every worker has joined; its workers
serve nothing at all. That is the part stub processes could never exercise, and
it is why this path survived four phases untested: the command line was
checked, the sequence was not.

Measured on the cluster:

- a 2-node replica on each fabric, node01+node02 on ib-a and node03+node04 on
  ib-b, four GPUs from each
- a request served through one of them
- only the leader listening — node02 had no port open at all, which is
  ServesHTTP working end to end rather than in a unit test
- node02 killed; at t+60s it was declared lost, the ib-a replica failed and was
  reaped; at t+80s a replacement was ready on ib-b, the fabric that could still
  host it, while node01 sat idle rather than being paired across fabrics

The invariant held under the one condition that tests it: when a replica could
not be rebuilt where it was, it moved to a fabric that could hold all of it
rather than spanning two.

What this does not prove is written into the plan next to what it does. The
GPUs are an inventory, the fabric is a sysfs-shaped directory, and the engine
speaks no NCCL — so the launch sequence is now exercised while the launch
arguments for vLLM and SGLang are still read from documentation rather than
from a running engine.

docs/node-onboarding.md is the procedure, including how to run all of this on
machines that have neither GPUs nor InfiniBand.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 12:34:23 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 c1ac2f022f Onboard a node with a script, and find two examples that never worked
New nodes had been joined by hand, four times, by me. There was no procedure,
so there was nothing to be wrong — and nothing to be right either. Two scripts
now: provision-node.sh makes the VM on Proxmox, onboard-node.sh gives it an
identity. They are separate because they are run by different people with
different access, and the second must run where the certificate authority is,
which is the one part that cannot be delegated.

Running them turned up why phase 4 was never verified. FabricAttachment
carried no koanf tags, so the `name:` key the shipped example documents bound
to nothing and `rate_gbps` was never read at all. An agent configured exactly
as instructed refused to start with "fabrics[0]: name is required" — naming
the key the operator had just written. Every fabric in this project had been
configured in a Go test, where the tags do not matter.

The server example did not load either: its models had no source, so it failed
validation the moment anything tried to parse it.

Both examples are now parsed by a test. A published example that has never
been loaded is a guess, and these two had been guesses since they were
written.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 12:28:36 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 a075ff4120 Add approximate prefix routing, and find out it did nothing
Tier 1 of plan §7.5: a radix tree of request prefixes that estimates which
replica has already prefilled one. Bytes, not tokens — needing the engine's
exact tokenizer is what makes tier 2 a separate project.

It went in inert, and the decision metric is what caught it: 144 lookups, zero
hits. The cause was a rule I had written and tested for. A node's label is the
first request that created it, so the second request for the same system
prompt diverges in its last few bytes — a new question after the same
preamble, the single most common shape there is. Requiring the whole label to
match threw away the 700 bytes they shared. What matters is the shared head,
because that is what the engine cached, and a partial label match now counts.
Two unit tests asserted the wrong rule and have been inverted.

With that fixed, measured end to end against engines whose caches are too
small for the working set: 22.5% cache hits without, 81.7% with, and the
breakdown shows the misses are exactly the first round, when the tree is
empty.

The scenario matters as much as the number. With a handful of prompts and a
large cache, scattering is free — every replica ends up holding everything —
and prefix routing can only add constraint. The first version of the test
measured that case and showed a loss, which was a true statement about a
situation the feature is not for.

Two things keep it from being the disaster prefix routing usually is. The
imbalance guard, which needs both an absolute and a relative gap before it
fires, because either alone misfires — absolute on an idle cluster, relative
on a busy one. And it is a scorer rather than a filter: affinity is a vote the
queue and inflight scorers can outvote, not a rule.

The tree records the replica the picker actually chose, not the one the scorer
proposed, and a node prefers the replica it has seen most rather than most
recently — a count is stable under a randomizing picker, where recency just
chases whatever the picker last did.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 12:13:19 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 555e4678cb Ship the systemd units, and stop the plan lying about what is done
Phase 3 had a block duplicated into itself, including an unchecked
'EndpointSource becomes dynamic' sitting directly under the checked line
saying it was wired. Several phase 5 items had shipped without being ticked.

The units were only ever on the machines and in a scratch directory, which
makes them undocumented operational knowledge rather than part of the project.
KillMode=process in particular is not obvious and not optional: without it
systemd takes the engines down with the agent, turning a thirty-second upgrade
into a model reload on every node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 10:04:44 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 216fc9bb03 Let people sign up, be approved, and issue their own keys
Every key needed an operator with a shell. This adds the login system that
made that necessary, which is the thing I argued against building until it was
asked for — so it is built as if it will be attacked, because a public login
form is.

Signing up produces an account that can do nothing. Approval is what makes it
work and stays on the CLI: having a shell on the control plane is what makes
someone an administrator, and that is a smaller thing to get right than roles
and an admin UI that mints credentials.

The details that matter:

Passwords are argon2id, where a slow hash is correct — the input is chosen by
a human and has a dictionary, which is the opposite of an API key. Both kinds
of authentication now live in this codebase and they are in separate packages
so neither set of assumptions leaks into the other. Length is the only rule:
composition rules push people towards Password1! and cost more entropy than
they buy.

Signup never says whether an address already has an account, and sign-in
answers the same way for a wrong password and a missing account — verifying
against a dummy hash when there is no user, so a stopwatch cannot enumerate
accounts. Account state is checked after the password, not before, so guessing
an address reveals nothing about it. Guessing is bounded per address rather
than per IP: an attacker has many addresses to come from and one to guess
against, and limiting by IP locks out an office behind one NAT.

Sessions are server-side, so signing out and suspending take effect
immediately rather than whenever a token expires; suspension is checked in the
same query that resolves the session, because a second round trip is a check
somebody eventually forgets. Every state-changing form carries a CSRF token
verified against a hash in the session — a cookie authenticates the browser,
not the page that asked.

Key ownership is enforced in the UPDATE rather than by reading first, so a
guessed key id from another account changes nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 09:32:35 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 8d35faf6f8 Give the landing page somewhere to send people
The page explained the API, said keys come from an operator, and left the
reader there. Someone who reaches the address without a key had no route to
getting one, which is where onboarding stopped.

`landing.contact` is that route, because the gateway cannot guess who to ask.
An address becomes a mailto link, an http(s) URL stays a link, and anything
else — a channel, a queue, a person — is shown as text. Other schemes are
never linked: this string comes from configuration, configuration is not
always written by whoever runs the gateway, and a javascript: href on a page
served to every visitor is a short path to a stored XSS. Escaping the text
does not make a scheme safe.

Unconfigured, it now says something rather than nothing, and the page explains
that a key arrives as a one-time link so the reader knows what to expect
before it lands.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 09:22:42 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 0b93fb2883 Enforce budgets and rate limits, and write usage off the request path
The second half of phase 5. A key now has a cost, a quota and a bill.

Rate limits use a sliding window rather than a fixed one. A fixed window lets
a caller send its whole minute's allowance in the last second of one window
and again in the first second of the next, so the observed rate is twice the
configured limit exactly when the system is least able to take it. Checking
and charging are one operation, or two concurrent requests both see room and
both take it.

Token limits are checked against an estimate, because the real count only
exists once the request has run; the difference is charged afterwards, so a
caller who consistently underestimates is still bounded, one window late. A
request with no max_tokens gets a modest assumption rather than zero —
assuming zero would let an unbounded request through every token limit.

Limits are checked before admission, not after: a request over its quota
should be refused rather than queued, where it would occupy a band's capacity
to no purpose. All refusals are 429, but a spent budget carries no Retry-After
because waiting does not help until the period rolls over, and saying
otherwise turns one client into a retry loop.

Usage goes to a buffered channel and is written in batches. Record never
blocks: if the buffer fills — a database stalled long enough to lose eight
thousand records — records are dropped and counted, because losing accounting
is bad and turning a stalled database into an outage is worse. A clean
shutdown drains what is queued; those are requests that were already served.
Failures are logged at error, since silently losing billing data is the kind
of thing discovered at the end of a month.

Requests are accounted whatever their outcome. A request that used a GPU and
then failed still used it, and a key that could spend nothing by failing would
be a way around a budget.

Budgets are counted in memory and restored from the store at startup, so a
restart does not hand every key a fresh allowance. The budget period travels
with the reservation rather than being re-derived, because a monthly budget
credited to a daily counter is a budget that never binds.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 08:52:36 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 45c8cd23a3 Close the gateway: API keys, tenancy and model allowlists
Until now anything that could reach the client port could use every model in
the catalog. A key now resolves to an identity, and that identity decides what
it may do.

Authentication wraps the whole mux rather than checking inside each handler,
so adding a route cannot add an unauthenticated one by omission. Health stays
open, because a load balancer has no key and a health check that needs one
reports the gateway down.

Nothing on the request path reads the database. A key is resolved once and
answered from memory until the entry expires; rejections are cached too, so a
client looping with a bad key cannot turn into a database read per request.
The price is that a revocation takes up to cache_ttl to take effect, which is
the trade stated in the configuration next to the knob. A store failure is
not an authentication answer: it is never cached as one and returns 503, not
401 — sending someone hunting for a key problem that does not exist wastes the
one thing an incident is short of. A revoked key is refused with the same
message as an unknown one, because saying otherwise confirms the key was real.

With auth on the band comes from the key and the band header is ignored. The
header was trusted only while there was nothing to consult, and it let any
client promote itself into the top priority band. Tenant fairness within a
band is now per key rather than per session, so one caller cannot take a band
by opening many sessions.

Allowlists are decided per model, not per string: a model's canonical name and
every alias name the same thing, so either form works in an allowlist and no
alias can reach a model that was not allowed. The first version of that test
passed without the resolution being there at all, which is why it now checks
all four combinations.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 08:44:33 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 ec1b6b04df Fix an agent that could neither explain itself nor stop
Two bugs found while verifying mTLS against real machines.

session cancelled its own derived context and then asked that context
whether the agent was shutting down. The answer was always yes, so every
stream error read as a clean close: the log said err=<nil>, the backoff
reset, and an agent whose certificate the control plane refused hammered it
forever at the base interval with nothing to diagnose. It now keeps the
parent context to answer that question, and a refusal reaches the operator
naming both the certificate and the claim.

Cancelling the context also did not stop the agent. HTTP/2 watches the
context while the request body is being written, and a bidirectional stream
spends its life blocked on the read side instead, so the read never returned.
Measured on a deployed node: `systemctl stop llmgw-agent` took 90 seconds and
ended in SIGKILL, on every restart. Closing the response when the context
ends is what actually unblocks it.

TestAgentStopsWhenContextEnds hangs reliably without the second fix, which is
the only reason to trust that it tests it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 08:03:21 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 2373726efd Agent stream: connect the fleet to the control plane
One bidirectional connect-go stream per node, carrying registration, heartbeats
and shard status up, and start, stop and drain down. The agent dials out: GPU
nodes sit behind firewalls far more often than a control plane does, and an
outbound connection needs no inbound rule on every node in the fleet.

- registration carries the whole hardware inventory, so there is no separate
  discovery call and a reconnecting agent refreshes what the scheduler knows.
  The fabric labels travel with it; they cannot be inferred from the wire, so
  losing them in transit would silently disable multi-node placement.
- agentsvc is both the stream handler and the reconciler's dispatcher, because
  it holds the open streams and is therefore the only thing that can deliver a
  command to a node.
- the agent validates a profile before launching anything, since an engine that
  refuses a profile does so after minutes of loading, then supervises the
  process and reports every transition with the engine's output tail on failure.
- reconnects forever with jittered backoff. A control plane restart must not
  require touching every GPU node, and a fleet must not reconnect in lockstep
  and knock it over again. Engines keep serving throughout, because the router
  talks to them directly.

llmgw agent is real now, and llmgw server runs a control plane whenever any
model declares a profile. The static endpoint list stays for router-only runs.

Verified with real binaries as separate processes: the agent registers, a
replica is placed, an engine launches through the vLLM adapter's actual argument
construction, streaming traffic is served, and killing the agent moves the node
through unreachable to lost with placement explaining why nothing can run.

config.Model and catalog.Model were the same thing described twice, so the
router now reads catalog entries directly and the validation rules live in one
place.

Still missing: mTLS. The stream is plaintext HTTP/2 and must stay on a trusted
network until that lands.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:48:21 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 dc38dd6096 Phase 1.5: admission control
Inserted between quota checks and scheduling: admission answers when a request
may proceed, the scheduler still answers where it goes. Keeping them apart is
the point — an engine queue is FIFO and knows nothing about tenants, so once a
batch job is in it, no endpoint selection rescues the request behind it.

- saturation detector: one number per pool, the worse of queue depth and KV
  occupancy, since either alone misleads.
- priority bands with per-band saturation ceilings, so the cluster degrades from
  the bottom up.
- tenant round-robin within a band: one caller sending a thousand requests takes
  one slot in the rotation, not a thousand.
- bounded queues with capacity (503) and TTL (504); cancelled requests leave the
  queue instead of holding capacity.
- metrics for queue depth, wait time, rejections and pool saturation.

Exit criterion, measured in test/e2e: with 500 concurrent bronze requests
running continuously, interactive p99 in the platinum band stays at 1.04-1.24x
idle against a 1.5x budget. With admission off the same load pushes it to
55-60x. Both directions are asserted, so the test fails if admission regresses
and also if the load generator stops being a real load.

Two lags had to be closed, and they needed different answers. Engine metrics are
scraped and lag an interval; router inflight does not, but it counts running
requests, and treating those as queue makes a healthy engine look overloaded
every interval. What is actually queued is inflight minus batch capacity, and
capacity is not in the metric contract, so it is learned as the high-water mark
of observed running. Separately, between admission granting a request and the
router dispatching it the request is invisible everywhere, so a simultaneous
burst passed the check en masse; the controller now counts its own outstanding
leases against dispatched inflight.

One plan correction: a saturation ceiling of 1.0 was documented as "never held
back". It is not — it means "flow up to the healthy limit". A band that must
never wait needs a ceiling above 1. Plan §7.2.2 updated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 01:53:38 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 a3f71aa5ee Phase 1: the router serves traffic
llmgw server is real now. It fronts a static set of engine replicas with an
OpenAI-compatible API, scoring endpoints through the pipeline added in the
previous commit.

- proxy: SSE relayed event by event with a flush after each, cancellation
  propagated upstream, and separate deadlines for dial, headers, first token,
  inter-token idle and total. The idle watchdog is what distinguishes a wedged
  engine from a slow one.
- router: dispatch with retry and model fallback. Retry only happens while
  nothing has reached the client; after that, splicing two responses together
  would be worse than the short stream the client already sees.
- config: YAML via koanf overlaid on defaults, with LLMGW_ env overrides.
  Validation rejects duplicate endpoint ids and aliases that shadow a model,
  because both misroute silently at request time rather than failing loudly.
- metrics: requests, duration, TTFT, tokens, plus per-scorer values and
  per-filter drops on a separate admin listener with health and pprof.

Phase 1 exit criterion, measured in test/e2e: 1000 concurrent streams across
3 sim-engines complete at ~6800 req/s; every client disconnect frees the KV
blocks on every engine; router overhead p99 is about 0.9 ms against the plan's
2 ms budget.

The handlers live in internal/router rather than an internal/router/openai
package as the plan's tree sketched: they need the dispatch loop, and splitting
them apart would have meant an interface with exactly one implementation. Plan
§4 updated to match.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 01:41:13 +02:00