Development Update — May 29

The routing-policy work keeps building. Yesterday’s Starlark policies gain a WASM backend (a compiled, language-agnostic alternative to the Starlark interpreter), the operator-facing name “skylark”, periodic route rotation, a hypervisor-UI panel to manage it, and runtime per-app hot-swap. Underneath, the router’s mux loop gets a best-effort + local-fallback path, and the CXO node sheds a long-standing accept-path serialization bottleneck. Two releases, v1.3.60 and v1.3.61, go out.

Skywire: Routing Policy — WASM Backend, Rotation, and “Skylark”

2913 feat(router/policy): WASM backend for routing policies — alongside the Starlark interpreter, policies can be compiled to WASM and run through a WASM backend. Starlark is the readable, write-it-inline option; WASM is the compile-it-from-any-language, run-it-fast option. The router can evaluate either.

2912 docs(routing-policy): introduce “skylark” operator-facing name — the operator-facing name for the policy system: skylark (skywire + Starlark). A name an operator can search for and reason about.

2916 feat: periodic rotation hook + WASM ABI extension + 2921 fix: start rotation loop from SetRotation, not init — a policy can rotate routes periodically (e.g. shift a flow onto a fresh set of disjoint paths every N seconds), driven by a rotation hook, with a matching WASM ABI extension so WASM policies can do it too. The rotation loop starts when rotation is actually set, not unconditionally at init.

2919 feat: re-land extension dispatch + runtime per-app swap — extension dispatch returns, and a policy can be hot-swapped per app at runtime — change the policy governing your proxy’s routing without restarting anything.

2922 feat: avoid_direct knob to force overlay path → 2924 refactor: drop avoid_direct, rely on min_hops — a brief design iteration: an avoid_direct knob to force the overlay was added, then dropped in favor of expressing the same intent through min_hops (a minimum hop count > 1 already forces the overlay), keeping the vocabulary minimal. AppName threading is re-applied in the same pass.

2911 feat: hook into sky_forward_conn direct dials + 2908 feat(router): wire DialHook into PingRoute — the policy hook reaches more of the dial surface: forwarded-connection direct dials and the ping path both consult it, so policy governs measurement and forwarding too, not just app dials.

2918 feat(hypervisor-ui): routing-policy panel in the routing tab — the hypervisor UI gains a routing-policy panel in the routing tab, so the policy can be viewed and managed from the dashboard, not only the CLI.

Skywire: Router — Mux Resilience

2909 feat(router): mux loop best-effort + local-calc fallback + 2910 feat(router): parallel mux aux dials — the multiplexed-route construction becomes best-effort with a local-calculation fallback (assemble what you can from known transports if the route-finder is slow), and the auxiliary mux dials run in parallel rather than serially — faster to bring up N routes.

Skywire: CXO — Shard the Connection Maps

2907 fix(cxo/node): shard connection maps to remove Node.mx accept-path serialization — the CXO node kept its connection maps under a single Node.mx mutex, which serialized the accept path: every incoming connection contended on one lock. Sharding the maps removes that bottleneck, so accepts scale instead of queuing behind each other. A foundational throughput fix for a node handling many peers.

Skywire: Storage + Transport

• 2926 fix(bbolthealth): cover all visor bbolt opens + recover from probe panic — the bbolt corruption-recovery now covers every bbolt open in the visor (not just the ones fixed earlier) and recovers from a panic in the health probe itself.
• 2927 fix(transport): count VStream + ping bytes in sent counter — the sent-bytes counter now includes VStream and ping bytes, so the accounting matches reality.
• 2928 fix(router): tune circuit breaker for dmsg-session refresh cadence — the circuit breaker is tuned to the dmsg-session refresh cadence so a normal refresh doesn’t trip it.

Skywire: Apps + Releases

• 2914 feat(apps): –reconnect for skysocks-client and skynet-client — both clients gain a --reconnect flag to re-establish on drop.
• v1.3.60 (65 PRs on top of v1.3.59) and v1.3.61 (autoconfig writes to the resolved config path, via 2931/2932) ship.