Development Update — June 17

The big structural change of the day was collapsing the visor’s two same-key dmsg clients into one — and the bumpy path it took to land. The visor had been running a discovery client and a direct client under the same public key, and because dmsg servers evict by newest-session-wins, the two were quietly evicting each other on every shared server: a continuous self-eviction storm measured at tens of session-deaths per minute per server. The fix went in, got reverted when it surfaced a fatal re-entrant deadlock, and was re-applied with the deadlock fixed. Around that headline: a clutch of resolving-proxy alias features (including a clickable home.dmsg directory page), a redis-starvation fix in service discovery, a dmsg-server config simplification, and the noise-fork PQ design doc catching up to the code.

Skywire: One dmsg Client per Visor

The visor ran two dmsg clients under one public key — dmsgC for discovery and dmsgDC for direct/dmsg-HTTP. Since dmsg servers key sessions by client-PK and evict the older session when a newer one appears, those two clients evicted each other on every server they shared — a self-eviction storm (server-confirmed ~56 session-deaths/min/server, all from visors), worst during redeploys.

3136 fix(dmsg): converge the visor to a single dmsg client collapses them into one. The viable path turned out to be a client whose reads resolve direct-first (seeded service and dmsg-disc keys short-circuit, so they never take the HTTP-over-dmsg round-trip to the entry-less dmsg-disc that otherwise hot-loops) but whose writes still publish to HTTP discovery so the visor keeps registering. A subtle wrinkle had to be solved along the way: the serve loop posts an entry before any session exists, so that initial post is now always a no-op and durable registration is deferred to the post-session loop.

That first landing didn’t survive validation. 3138 reverted it after it exposed a fatal re-entrant sesMx deadlock — the single-client convergence dialed inside the session mutex it already held. 3139 fix(dmsg): re-entrant sesMx deadlock in single-client convergence re-applies the convergence with the dial moved outside sesMx, breaking the re-entrancy. This is the foundation the next day’s cold-start recovery work would build on, and the kind of change that’s only safe to make because the local visor is rolled onto it and watched boot clean before merge.

Skywire: Resolving-Proxy Aliases

A run of changes made the dmsg resolving proxy reachable by friendly name instead of raw 66-character public keys.

3127 feat(resolver): canonical service aliases for the dmsg resolving proxy derives short, well-known names — dmsgd, tpd, ar, rf, sd, ut — by pulling each service’s PK out of its dmsg:// URL, so a service’s HTTP API is reachable as e.g. http://tpd.dmsg/health. The aliases mirror the existing CLI service namespace, are auto-derived with no new config surface, and extend to the route/transport setup nodes (rsn/tsn) and — via the direct client, since they register no discovery entry — the dmsg servers themselves (dmsg0, dmsg1, …). Crucially the server aliases are sourced from the live discovery cache, not the bootstrap-only config list, so they track exactly what discovery currently advertises rather than naming decommissioned servers.

3132 and 3133 add and then rename the reward-system alias: the reward system’s HTTP API becomes reachable as rewards.dmsg, matching the user-facing skywire cli rewards namespace and the dominant /rewards HTTP path. The whole alias feature is documented in docs/guides/resolving-proxy.md.

3134 feat(resolver): home.dmsg directory page of all resolver aliases adds a reserved home label that the proxy serves in-process: a self-contained HTML page listing every alias the resolver knows — this visor, the deployment services, setup nodes, dmsg servers — each linked so a browser can click through over the mesh. The page is synthetic and proxy-only, generated in the Dial path and written straight back over the SOCKS5 connection; the visor never serves it on a real port and full keys are shown, never truncated.

Skywire: dmsg-server Config + Discovery

3128 feat(dmsg-server): borrow embedded servers when servers is empty lets a dmsg-server with an explicit discovery but no hand-maintained servers list fill its transit-server set from the binary’s embedded deployment data, matched by discovery_dmsg public key. The servers: [...] block has been a recurring source of stale-address wedges on cold restart, and operators can now drop it while keeping their discovery and per-deployment knobs. Servers stay coupled to their discovery — an unrecognized discovery PK is left empty rather than grafted with a mismatched deployment’s servers.

3129 feat(dmsg-disc): log dmsg-server entry registrations with PK + sequence + source adds a structured log line for server registrations only (a handful of servers, not the ~160/sec client heartbeats), capturing the registering key, sequence, advertised address, and source. It makes a duplicate-key collision obvious from the logs alone — two different sources for one server key, or a sequence climbing far faster than the ~1/min heartbeat, points straight at the offending host.

Skywire: Redis Starvation in Service Discovery

3135 fix(service-discovery): chunk the by-type MGET to stop starving redis splits a single huge MGET over a service type’s members — hundreds of service:skysocks:<pk> keys in production — into bounded 256-key batches. Redis is single-threaded, so the one giant command blocked the server for the whole batch (~40ms observed), starving every other client’s command, including dmsg-discovery’s tiny GET on the same redis. Chunking lets redis interleave other clients between batches, with no key dropped, duplicated, or reordered.

Skywire: PQ Design Doc + Cleanups

• 3119 docs(design): post-quantum hybrid noise handshake sketch lands the design that the previous day’s phase-1/phase-2 implementation realizes — hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768, payloads piggybacked in the KK handshake, mixed via HKDF after Split.
• 3131 fix(lint): clear golangci-lint failures on develop unblocks a release by fixing nine reported issues across the web subcommand, the noise DH test call sites left over from the flynn/noise migration, and the PQ hybrid combiner.
• 3137 fix(web): platform-split process-group helpers so Windows builds extracts the Unix-only Setpgid/syscall.Kill calls behind build-tagged helpers so the Windows release build (and its .msi) stops failing.
• 3130 chore(deps): bump UI dependencies rolls up a batch of replicated dependabot updates across the manager UI and tpviz.