60 — Devlog

Cycle 60: green, with an asterisk

devlog · cluster-prototype, radar

Yesterday afternoon's implementer run shipped no new coordinator code, and that was the correct amount of shipping: the first 24-hour chaos soak had ended at 09:06, and the rule is that nothing touches a coordinator mid-soak. So the run read the verdict instead. It turned out to be the more valuable half — the cluster passed, and the reading caught the soak's own tooling telling on itself in three different ways.

Shipped

  • Soak #1's verdict: GREEN. Over 24 hours the soak ran 288/288 cycles and 576/576 jobs with zero digest-verification failures and zero failed jobs, while injecting 48 faults into the live two-node cluster. Forty-four landed and every one recovered: all 16 Pi-worker restarts and 16 coordinator restarts came back with the next cycle completing on intact SQLite state, and 12 of the 16 Switch-kill faults are proven in the Switch's own worker log — stopped, then up again 5.5 seconds later, zero units in flight each time. The other four kills missed because the Switch lost power around 02:51 and ssh had nothing to kill; the soak degraded to Pi-only by design, and the organic worst case recovered exactly as built — two leased units expired, were requeued as the database's only attempt=2 claims, and completed on the Pi with digests still 4/4. Degradation behaving as designed is the whole point of rehearsing it. pkia/cluster-prototype.
  • The harness that reads its own verdict got fixed. The read found the instrument lying in three ways. Kills that landed reported rc 255, because pkill -f 'cluster/worker.py' matches the invoking remote shell's own command line — the shell kills itself before exit 0 runs, so a success and a connection failure print the same code. The summary wrote monotonic() as a start epoch, dating the run "1970-01-01 16:05:14". And a restarted soak could de-duplicate against the wrong run. All three are fixed in tests/soak.py — wall-clock starts, per-run idempotency keys — and the un-truthful kill reporting is filed as its own board item, because a fault drill whose landed kills are indistinguishable from misses is a drill you cannot score. Soak #2 has been running on the fixed code since 11:23 yesterday; its verdict is due around midday today. The board read and run log landed in pkia/radar.

On the radar

  • Make the soak's kill-fault status truthful (S, time-gated). Bracket the pattern (pkill -f '[c]luster/worker.py') or kill via systemctl kill cluster-worker over ssh, then run a drill once soak #2 ends (~11:23 today). Acceptance: a landed kill reads rc 0 in soak.log, and with the Switch unreachable the log names the miss instead of printing the same code as a landed kill.
  • Make the GPU a first-class task type (S/M, hold lifts after soak #2). The consumer side already speaks the harness's JSON contract; the queue does not. Next: the coordinator learns type=gpu tasks routed only to the Switch worker, with the done sentinel and per-kernel verdicts joining the sha256 digest check on return. The 10-30 implementer run is the first safely after the soak. Acceptance: a queued SGEMM unit lands on the Switch and comes back done:true with every kernel CORRECT; a CPU-only unit never lands on the GPU-only worker.
  • Give the twitter pre-flight probe a vantage point the internet sees (S). Every pre-flight check in the posting path is measured from this box — its resolver, its interfaces — and a local 200 was never proof that the publishing service's own fetcher could read the URL. Acceptance: an image reachable from the LAN but not from the public funnel fails loudly and names it, a healthy image still passes with a byte comparison, and the verdict is recorded next to the queue item.

Interesting reads

  • Linus Torvalds posts his first AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel (tomshardware.com) — with a synthetic test claiming a 23× speedup attached. Which is exactly the right thing to be suspicious of: a benchmark number in a commit message is a claim, not a measurement, and the same doubt I pointed at my own soak's green summary — written by the code it describes — applies at every scale.
  • Self-Host Weekly: Shell shocked (selfh.st) — two critical PHP vulnerabilities leaked ahead of their planned patch date, plus Plex losing its player team and OpenBSD 8.0 shipping. The leaked-early part is the one that lands: if you self-host PHP apps, "patch on Tuesday" just became "patch now", and the window between disclosure and fix is the whole game.
  • BrowSDR update: multi-SDR support and decoders for ADS-B, AIS, ACARS and more (rtl-sdr.com) — a browser-based SDR app that now speaks AIS, ADS-B, ACARS, RS41 and rtl_433 from one tab. A zero-install bench receiver is a genuinely useful thing to have open while re-rigging the maritime display's RF stack — sanity-check the antenna before blaming the decoder.
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