Commit Graph
4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
claude dc0fef71f8 test(seed): force scenario 8's interleaving instead of racing for it
Scenario 8 started a real publisher once a consumer's clone was observed
past a fraction of the tree, then asserted the consumer ended up holding
the NEW generation. That premise is racy: when the publish lands after the
consumer's last identity read, the consumer legitimately completes a whole,
consistent generation 1 — and the assertion called that "the seeded tree is
truncated". The one gate this repo has was failing intermittently in the
most alarming direction available.

Replaced with two scenarios that place the interference deterministically,
the way prune-cache-selftest.sh scenario 12 places a marker inside the
check-to-unlink window: the consumer's own `cp` is stubbed, so whatever the
stub does happens strictly after hardlink_clone_into read the source's
entry count and inode and strictly before it reads that inode again.

  8a  the stub runs the real copy, then the real publish-snapshot.sh
      concurrently, and returns only once the swap is on disk. The copy
      succeeds and the staging tree is whole, so the source's identity is
      the only witness.
  8b  the stub renames a subtree out of the source's listing before the
      walk starts and back before the retry. The copy exits 0 and the
      source's identity never changes, so the entry count is the only
      witness — the silent truncation this whole guard exists for.

Each asserts WHICH of the clone's checks reported the tear (assert_tear),
so neither stays green if the check it exercises is deleted and another
happens to fire in its place.

Closes #3
2026-08-24 10:56:42 -05:00
claudeandClaude Opus 5 719475831b fix(cargo-cache): scope the safety claim to what the code actually prevents
Follow-up to f57e2a6, addressing the reviewer's sharpest question: is the race
"closed by construction", or merely detected and retried? The honest answer is
"both, on different paths", and the README said only the first half.

* README now states three claims separately instead of collapsing them:
  a publisher rotating a snapshot cannot tear a clone of it (by construction —
  the marker ordering prevents the unlink, and the consumer's verification is
  a redundant second check on that path); every OTHER way the source can
  change mid-clone is detected, not prevented (the eviction pass's reader
  check is check-then-delete, and a seed-fallback-dir has no interlock at all
  — there, verification plus a bounded retry and a loud failure is the whole
  guard); and disk reclamation is bounded rather than immediate. Overclaiming
  this property once was the finding; overclaiming it twice would be worse.

* publish-snapshot-selftest.sh now covers the PUBLISHER's half of the race,
  where a reader of the swap belongs. Scenario 3 only ever covered a consumer
  that had already FINISHED cloning — safe for free, since its own hardlinks
  keep the inodes alive. New scenario 6 covers a reader still in flight past
  the grace period (the generation is left on disk, the deferral is warned
  about, and an earlier consumer is still unaffected); scenario 7 covers the
  sweep, so "we defer instead of forcing" cannot quietly become a disk leak.
  Red-proven against 248af306's scripts:

    ASSERTION FAILED: the previous generation was unlinked while a reader
    still held it

  The consumer's half stays in seed-target-dir-selftest.sh scenario 8, which
  still red-proves at 16693 of 48805 entries against the same scripts.

* seed-target-dir-selftest.sh now asserts what happens when the retries are
  EXHAUSTED, not just what hardlink_clone_into returns: an unreadable source
  makes the seed script exit non-zero, name the reason, leave no target dir,
  and — the one that matters — not fall through to its cold-start branch. A
  corrupt-cache bug degrading into an invisible 4x-slower CI job is the
  failure mode worth pinning down. Skipped when running as root, where mode
  bits deny nothing.

* usage_kb: a directory we cannot read measured as the empty string, which was
  then spliced into usage_gb's awk program and made it a syntax error at the
  exact moment something was already going wrong. Now measures 0.

Verification: `bash scripts/selftest.sh` — 5 suites, exit 0, 82 assertions
(was 75 after f57e2a6, 63 before). shellcheck over scripts/: no new findings.

Measured the cost the reviewer asked about, on ext4, warm cache, 78,554
entries: `cp -al` 3126 ms against 44 ms for one `find | wc -l`. Two counts per
attempt is ~2.8% on top of the clone. Not measured on the CI runner's volume.

Refs: daniel/gitdan#11, zemyna#911

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Sqh2vscfzisk83VuPVQX9L
2026-08-23 16:49:44 -05:00
claudeandClaude Opus 5 f57e2a6013 fix(cargo-cache): close the seed-vs-republish race the design claimed to close
The shared action's justification over zemyna's and emowheel's schemes was
that hardlink-cloning from a published snapshot closes gitdan #911 "by
construction, not by the single job slot". Review disproved that. This makes
the claim true, and corrects the README where it could only be bounded.

Finding 1 (verdict-level) — silent partial clone
------------------------------------------------
`hardlink_clone_into` ran `cp -al` with no exit-status check, and both call
sites invoked it as a condition, which suppresses `set -e` for the whole call.
A publisher's `rm -rf` of the generation it rotated away therefore unlinked
entries beneath an in-flight consumer walk, and the truncated tree was renamed
into place and reported as success.

Both layers are fixed:

* The consumer verifies its own clone. Every attempt checks `cp -al`'s status
  explicitly, the source directory's inode before and after (a wholesale
  replacement mid-walk splices two generations), and the entry count — the
  only signal for a subtree unlinked before its parent was listed, since
  `cp -al` reports no error for one it never saw. Any failure discards the
  staging tree and retries; exhausting the attempts returns a distinct status
  2 and fails the job rather than seeding a partial cache. `unshare_subtree` /
  `_unshare_files` now propagate failure too — a swallowed unshare leaves the
  clone aliasing its source, the exact corruption that step exists to prevent.
* The publisher does not unlink under a reader. A consumer publishes a
  `.reading-<snapshot>-<tag>` marker before it resolves the snapshot path; the
  publisher scans for markers after its first rename. A consumer holding the
  old generation therefore published its marker before that scan and cannot be
  missed; one arriving after the scan necessarily resolves to the new
  generation. The publisher waits for readers to drain and, on timeout,
  DEFERS reclamation rather than forcing it — the old generation is left as
  `.publish-old-<key>-<tag>` and swept by a later publish.

So correctness is closed by construction; disk reclamation is bounded, not
immediate. The residual is capped at one deferred generation per publisher
ref, and the README now says exactly that instead of the disproved claim.

Finding 2 — restore-mtimes.sh ran with no errexit
-------------------------------------------------
`set -euo pipefail` was glued to the end of a comment (`# soundness.set -euo
pipefail`), so it was entirely commented out: a partial failure of the
`git log | awk` pipeline would have produced wrong mtimes across the whole
restore instead of failing loudly. Moved to its own line. Audited every other
script for the same defect — this was the only instance. Independent
confirmation: shellcheck's two SC2164 warnings on this file's `cd "$repo_root"`
disappear now that errexit is actually in effect.

Finding 3 — lock-acquire window
-------------------------------
A just-seeded directory was unlocked until a later action step, so a
concurrent job's prune pass could evict it. `seed-target-dir.sh` now takes an
optional lock-id and writes the lock marker on every path out of the script,
including into the staging tree before its rename, so the directory carries a
lock the instant it appears under its final name. The action's acquire step
stays (it is idempotent and stamps the LRU marker).

Also hardened `prune-cache.sh` to treat a directory with live reader markers
as locked. Today no reachable configuration prunes a snapshot — only protected
refs publish them and protected refs are excluded from every pass — so this is
redundant by policy; it is here so that stops being the reason it is safe.

Verification
------------
New selftest scenario 8 races a real seed against a real publish rotation,
gating the rotation on the seed's *observed* clone progress so the window is
hit deterministically rather than on a fast machine's coin flip. Red-proven
against the unguarded scripts, three consecutive runs:

  ASSERTION FAILED: the seeded tree is truncated: 15443 entries against the
  snapshot's 493 (was 48805 before the rotation)      (15443 / 16986 / 16498)

Green after the fix, six consecutive runs, catching the clone mid-walk at
~10.5k of 48805 entries each time. Scenario 9 covers deferred reclamation and
its later sweep; scenario 10 covers an unreadable source failing loudly.

`bash scripts/selftest.sh`: 5 suites, exit 0, 75 assertions (was 63).
shellcheck over `scripts/`: no new findings, two SC2164 warnings resolved.

Docs: README's republish-safety paragraph replaced with what the code now
guarantees, including the bounded disk residual stated explicitly; new
`read-grace-seconds` / `reader-stale-seconds` inputs documented in the
`cargo-cache-publish` table; the selftest table names the new race.

Refs: daniel/gitdan#11, zemyna#911

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Sqh2vscfzisk83VuPVQX9L
2026-08-23 16:40:21 -05:00
claudeandClaude Opus 5 248af3061e feat(cargo-cache): hardlink-clone a per-ref Cargo cache from a published snapshot
Replaces the phase-0 resolution probe with the real actions, merging the two
independent per-branch Cargo cache implementations on this forge into the
design neither of them had.

## The merge

- zemyna seeds a PR branch by `cp -al` hardlink clone (near-free: cost scales
  with inode count, not bytes) from the base branch's LIVE target dir — a
  torn read waiting for a second job slot (its own #911).
- emowheel seeds from a PUBLISHED IMMUTABLE SNAPSHOT (no race by
  construction) but with `cp -a`, duplicating ~35 GB per branch.

This ships hardlink-clone FROM a published snapshot: zemyna's cost profile,
emowheel's soundness, and #911 closed structurally rather than by the runner
happening to have one execution slot.

## The bug both implementations have

A build inside a `cp -al` clone DOES mutate the directory it was cloned from.
Cargo replaces real artifacts, but writes its metadata — and build scripts
write their OUT_DIR — with a plain truncating write, straight through the
shared inode. Measured set: `.fingerprint/<unit>/dep-<target>` (under
CARGO_UNSTABLE_CHECKSUM_FRESHNESS), `build/<pkg>/{output,root-output,out/**}`,
`deps/*.d` and `<profile>/*.d`.

The checksum-freshness case is a wrong answer, not a slow build: a PR clone
rewrites the base's dep-info to describe the PR's sources while the base's
cache still holds the artifact built from the base's; once the PR merges, the
base's next run finds the checksums match, reports `Fresh`, and links a binary
built from the pre-merge code. Reproduced end to end.

Fix: hardlink the artifacts (the GB), real-copy the metadata (the MB) — about
3.7% of a 6.9 GB Bevy target dir, against 100% for a full copy.

## Contents

- `cargo-cache/action.yml` — consume: resolve keys, seed from the base's
  snapshot via staging + one atomic rename, strip Cargo lock files, unshare
  the mutable paths, restore mtimes from git history, lock, prune.
- `cargo-cache-publish/action.yml` — publish: record the build watermark,
  atomically republish the snapshot on a protected branch, release the lock
  (`mode: release-lock` for the `if: always()` step).
- `scripts/` — all logic, so it is testable standalone; the YAML is wiring.
- `scripts/*selftest.sh` + `selftest.sh` — five suites, 63 assertions, every
  fix paired with a control that reproduces the bug. All green locally.

Eviction merges emowheel's liveness pass (dead branches pruned
unconditionally, not gated on disk pressure) with LRU-under-pressure, but
inverts the order within the pressure pass: `target-*` before `snapshot-*`,
because a snapshot is hardlinked to everything cloned from it, so evicting one
frees almost no real bytes while costing every future PR its warm start.

restore-mtimes.sh is ported from emowheel (the watermark variant, which closes
the merge hazard zemyna's copy still has) with its provenance de-projectised.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Sqh2vscfzisk83VuPVQX9L
2026-08-23 14:18:01 -05:00