oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron

installinator: progress reports are intermittent when there are unresponsive bootstrap peers

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#3,184 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
572
Forks
97
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
96

Description

#3159 fixed an issue that would cause installinator downloads to time out if it tried to contact unresponsive peers on the bootstrap network; however, it revealed a less serious issue: when sending any given progress report, installinator waits until it has finished sending to all peers before potentially sending another report. If there are unreponsive peers, that may take ~15 seconds (our current HTTP connection timeout), which means peers that are responsive (and in particular, the one peer that really cares about progress) only sees a new report every ~15 seconds.

This doesn't prevent mupdate from running but does make the installinator section of it feel sluggish / unresponsive. We should fix if we can but it's not a priority above missing functionality.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Trace installinator's progress-report sending path and its HTTP connection timeout, using the issue's peer-send behavior as the starting point. Verify completion by confirming responsive peers receive reports without waiting roughly 15 seconds on unresponsive peers, and that mupdate still runs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
distributed-systems, networking
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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