Commit Graph
13 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 5b425c32e5 Ship binaries with releases, and ask engines whether our flags still exist
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m31s
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 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 058ee382fa An agent reporting nothing is reporting something
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m18s
The previous commit taught the reconciler to let go of shards an agent says
it is not running. It made no difference on the cluster, because the service
returned early when the agent's list was empty — which is precisely the case
that carries the news.

So the fix was dead code in production while its unit tests passed, and they
passed because they called the reconciler directly. The test added here goes
through the real stream instead, and asserts only that an agent running
nothing reaches the reconciler at all.

That is the lesson worth keeping: a test that calls the function under test
directly cannot tell you the caller never calls it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 10:36:35 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 aef1c143c5 Let go of shards an agent says it is not running
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m19s
Adoption handled "the agent has something we do not know about". The mirror
image was missing: "we think the agent has something it does not".

Both follow from the same rule — the fleet is authoritative about what is
running (plan §6.5) — and without the second half an engine that dies while
its agent survives leaves the control plane believing a replica is Ready
forever. Measured on the cluster: the engine was killed, the agent restarted
and registered with nothing running, and the replica stayed Ready pointing at
a dead port for two and a half minutes until I stopped watching. Traffic
survived, because the breaker took the endpoint out and retries covered it —
24 requests, none failed — so the only symptom was a cluster quietly running a
third short.

A registration follows a fresh connection, so anything dispatched over a
previous one is not running by definition; there is no window where a shard is
legitimately started but unreported.

The previous commit's disown rule was too broad, which this turned up: when a
known replica had a live shard it disowned everything the agent reported for
it, including the shards we already knew. A reconnecting agent would have been
told to stop the replica that was serving. It now disowns only what it does
not recognise.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 10:30:49 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 501db3d3e8 Add the llama.cpp engine, and let a profile ask for no GPU
llama.cpp is what makes a cluster with no cards useful: it serves the same
OpenAI API on CPU, so the whole path — placement, supervision, scraping,
scheduling, admission — can be exercised end to end on ordinary machines.

Three things had to give way for it.

A profile may now omit its GPU class, and that is how it says it runs on the
CPU. Only engines that can actually serve without a card may omit it; for
vLLM an omitted class stays an error, because otherwise a typo becomes a
replica placed on a machine with no hardware and diagnosed minutes later
during model loading. Placement spreads CPU replicas instead of bin packing
them, since unlike GPUs there is no allocation to stop two of them sharing a
machine's cores.

Metric mappings are now per engine rather than per cluster. llama.cpp calls
the same three numbers requests_processing, requests_deferred and
kv_cache_usage_ratio, and a single global mapping would leave half a mixed
fleet unmeasurable. An empty mapping still defaults to vLLM's names; one that
names its own Running metric is taken as a complete statement, so the fields
it leaves blank stay blank rather than being filled with names that engine
cannot have.

The adapter refuses multi-node and tensor-parallel profiles. llama.cpp splits
across local GPUs by a different mechanism than this adapter drives, and
accepting either would produce a replica that starts and then serves from one
machine while the catalog believes it has several.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 08:14:05 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 ec1b6b04df Fix an agent that could neither explain itself nor stop
CI / test (push) Successful in 54s
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
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 1e3cafdc86 Add a private CA and mutual TLS for the agent stream
A node's identity was whatever the agent said it was. With mutual TLS the
control plane compares the client certificate's common name against the
claimed node id and refuses the connection when they disagree, so identity
becomes something a node proves rather than something it picks.

A public authority cannot supply these certificates: Let's Encrypt and its
peers stopped issuing the clientAuth usage, and Go verifies client chains
against it. Hence internal/tlsconf/ca.go, a small authority whose key lives
on one machine and whose root is trusted everywhere, and `llmgw ctl cert`
over it so issuing is reproducible instead of remembered openssl.

The server certificate's hosts matter more than they look: hostname
verification reads subject alternative names and ignores the common name
entirely, so a certificate without the address agents dial — bare IP
included — is rejected no matter what its subject says. There is a test for
exactly that, because it is the failure everyone hits once.

requireIdentity stays wired to false until the configuration lands, so this
commit changes no running behaviour.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 07:28:56 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 e8d90cf375 Treat a zombie as dead, and test fairness where it is deterministic
CI / test (push) Successful in 52s
CI went red on Linux with two failures that never appear on macOS. Both were
worth the trip.

The first is a real bug. processAlive used kill(pid, 0), which succeeds on a
zombie — a process that has exited and is only waiting to be reaped. That
happens for real whenever an engine's parent dies before it does and nothing
reaps the orphan, which in a container is the normal case: PID 1 is usually the
workload rather than an init. The supervisor would then report a dead adopted
engine as running forever, and hold its GPUs against every future placement.
Zombies are now detected through procfs on Linux, where the answer exists, and
the check degrades to its old behaviour elsewhere rather than to something worse.

The second was a bad test. TestTenantFairnessWithinBand asserted on the order
goroutines sent to a channel after being admitted, which is the order the Go
scheduler woke them, not the order the dispatcher chose. Under load it measured
the runtime. The rotation itself lives in bandQueue.pop, which is pure, so it is
tested there — including what happens when a tenant runs out mid-rotation and
when a cancelled waiter is removed. The controller-level test now asserts the
thing that is actually stable: nobody is starved.

Verified with three consecutive `go test -race ./...` runs in a Linux container.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 06:34:08 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 1d1a6aebb0 Phase 4: make a multi-node replica able to start
CI / test (push) Failing after 53s
Placement and environment generation had landed early, which made multi-node
look further along than it was. A replica spanning nodes could not come up at
all, and all three reasons came down to assumptions that only hold on one node.

Not every rank serves HTTP. The agent health-checked every shard at its own
port, but only the leader answers; workers timed out, reported Failed and took
the replica with them. Engine.ServesHTTP now says which ranks serve, and a
worker is judged by staying alive. That is deliberately weaker evidence: the
replica's real readiness is the leader answering, which only happens once every
worker has joined.

A shard is not always one process. Engine.Commands returns a sequence — every
command but the last is a sidecar kept alive for the shard's lifetime and torn
down with it, and the last one's exit is the shard's. vLLM under Ray is why: the
leader runs a Ray head and then the server against it, while a worker runs only
the join and no vLLM process at all. RayCommand had been written and tested but
never called, so launch_mode: ray would have run vllm serve against a cluster
that did not exist. Sidecars are killed with the shard, because a Ray head left
behind holds the port the next replica needs.

Start order was backwards. Workers went first, on the theory that the head
should wait for them. Both engines put the rendezvous point on rank 0, so a
worker started first has nothing to connect to. vLLM's server blocks until the
Ray cluster has the GPUs it needs, so the leader can start immediately and waits
on its own. A command can now also require that rendezvous point to be listening
before the next starts, bounded by a timeout so a head that never appears fails
the shard instead of hanging it.

Stop was also killing only the engine, leaving sidecars behind.

None of this is verified against real engines — it is tested with stub
processes. The Ray sequencing, and which launch mode a given vLLM version wants,
can only be confirmed on hardware.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 06:20:03 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 75a8e76706 Survive a control plane restart without orphaning live engines
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m44s
Not persisting replica state left one hole: restarting the control plane made it
forget every replica while the engines kept running. They held GPUs the
inventory believed were free, so the next placement failed to allocate, with an
error naming the new process rather than the old one.

The fix belongs on the agent, not in a database. A row can say "running" about a
process that died; the fleet cannot.

- the supervisor writes the full shard spec, not just a pid and command line. A
  pid identifies a process; the spec is what lets it be described back to the
  control plane and matched to a replica.
- Adopt takes over an engine a previous agent left running. It is not this
  process's child, so it cannot be waited on: it is watched by polling and
  stopped by signalling its group directly. Its earlier output is gone and the
  log says so rather than presenting emptiness as silence.
- every Register reports what the agent is running, not only the first, because
  a reconnect may be a control plane restart and has to recover the same way.
- the reconciler rebuilds replicas from those reports and reclaims their GPUs.
  Anything whose model or profile left the catalog is stopped; nothing will
  route to it and it is holding cards.
- an engine the agent cannot identify is killed. A process holding GPUs that
  nothing can describe is worse than no process, because placement hands those
  GPUs out again.

Stop was also wrong for adopted shards: it checked for an exec.Cmd, which they
do not have, and reported them stopped without killing anything.

TestAgentReconnects had been passing for no reason. httptest's
CloseClientConnections does nothing to an h2c stream — prior-knowledge h2c
hijacks the connection and httptest stops tracking hijacked ones — so the agent
never reconnected, and the assertion on the connection map passed on a stale
entry. Tests now sever connections through their own listener and count opened
streams.

Plan §11 also records what multi-node still needs, since placement landing early
makes it look further along than it is: workers never become Ready because the
agent health-checks every shard while only rank 0 serves HTTP; RayCommand is
written and tested but never called; and startup is fire-and-forget.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 06:15:04 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 2373726efd Agent stream: connect the fleet to the control plane
CI / test (push) Failing after 1m29s
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 55417546fc Phase 2 (2/2): NVML backend behind a build tag
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m37s
NVML is the only source of NVLink topology, and that topology is what keeps a
tensor-parallel group off the slow path inside a node. It needs cgo, so it sits
behind the nvml tag and the default build keeps using nvidia-smi.

Discover() picks the backend and falls back to nvidia-smi when NVML fails,
logging the fallback rather than performing it silently: on a node that is meant
to have working NVML, a quiet downgrade hides a broken driver installation and
costs the scheduler its topology.

CI now compiles the tagged build. That immediately paid for itself: ErrNoNVML
was declared only in the untagged file, so the tests did not compile under
-tags nvml. It is now declared where both builds can see it.

Not verified: the NVML path has never run against a driver, because there is no
GPU machine available. The NVLink domains it reports should be treated as
unverified until someone runs `llmgw agent inventory` on a real node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:05:25 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 6a13e3dddf Phase 2 (1/2): node discovery, engine adapters, process supervisor
CI / test (push) Successful in 45s
Everything here works without GPUs and is covered by tests. The control plane
connection is not built yet, so llmgw agent itself is still a stub and the phase
exit criterion is not met.

- discovery: IB from /sys/class/infiniband, parsing the formats sysfs actually
  uses and telling native InfiniBand from RoCE; GPUs via nvidia-smi, the
  cgo-free path, with health flags for uncorrected ECC and memory already held
  by another process. A node without IB is not an error, it is a single-node
  island.
- engines: vLLM and SGLang command and environment construction, kept free of
  process handling so it stays testable. The NCCL environment is the part the
  plan marks critical: NCCL_IB_HCA lists only the chosen fabric's adapters,
  because leaving it open lets NCCL pick an adapter on a fabric where the peer
  is unreachable, and the job then hangs instead of failing.
- validation before launch: no mixed GPU types in a tensor-parallel group, the
  node/GPU/TP arithmetic has to add up, and fp8 is refused below compute
  capability 8.9 rather than silently falling back to a slower path.
- supervisor: process groups, because engines fork workers that hold GPU memory
  and outlive a signal sent only to the leader; a bounded log tail, since engine
  output is the only diagnosis when loading fails; Starting separate from
  Loading, because a 70B model legitimately takes minutes; and orphan adoption
  through pid files fingerprinted with the command line, since pids get reused
  and adopting an unrelated process is worse than leaking the original.
- readiness is two questions: /health says the process is up, /v1/models says
  the weights loaded. Routing on /health alone sends traffic into a loading model.
- llmgw agent inventory reports what the scheduler would see on a node.

One plan correction: GPU class sizes come from the driver in GiB, which does not
always match the marketing name. An L40S is sold as 48GB and reports 44.99 GiB,
so its class is l40s-45g, not l40s-48g. Consistency matters more than matching
the box, because that number decides whether a model fits. Plan §2 and §5.1
updated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:01:59 +02:00