Development Update — August 27

A day about the lifecycle of a mux leg. With per-frame noise aggregating a single stream across legs, the remaining failure modes are legs themselves misbehaving — black-holing, congesting, sitting in a different latency class, or living on the same LAN as their sibling — and today the router learned to admit, demote, replace and retire them deliberately. On top of that: a seamless in-flight route switch for proxy sessions, and a round of housekeeping from the SOCKS listener to the transport-discovery database.

Skywire: Managing the Legs

4248 adds latency-band admission, so the mux active set stays homogeneous — a leg far outside the band of its siblings waits in standby instead of dragging the reorder frontier. 4256 applies the same idea continuously, demoting gross latency outliers to standby in all modes. 4247 replaces a sole black-holing leg instead of wedging the group at zero, 4246 retires a manually removed leg on the far endpoint too, and 4253 rejects same-LAN legs at mux-set — route calculation cannot see that two paths share a first-hop LAN, so the router checks at attach.

Skywire: The Scheduler Learns Completion

4250 makes ECF, the completion-aware scheduler, the mux default — the fix for multi-leg throughput collapsing below a single leg’s. 4254 then closes two of ECF’s own traps: over-feeding a congesting leg whose buffer inflates its apparent capacity (the BDP trap), and dumping a cold-start burst onto an unmeasured leg. 4255 adds proactive head-of-line retransmit, re-sending the packet the frontier is stuck on before the timer fires.

Skywire: Switching Routes Without Dropping the Stream

4258 adds proxy switch: a running proxy session’s primary route moves onto a caller-supplied one without dropping the app’s SOCKS5 connection. Make-before-break — the new route attaches as a leg, the switch waits for it to actually carry, then the old primary retires; the route group and its encrypted session are never torn down, so the byte stream continues across the swap.

Skywire: Housekeeping

4245 sets SO_REUSEADDR/PORT on the SOCKS listener so a reconnect can’t leak the port, 4252 adds startup GC and compaction to reclaim unbounded cxds.db growth, 4251 gives dmsgscp an idle no-progress deadline instead of a fixed total timeout, and 4249 fixes unreadable dark-theme text across the manager UI. 4257 moves the real-origin browser substrate — the service worker, bridge protocol and responder guarding the trust boundary — out to a library, keeping in-tree only the skywire-specific transport fetch and bootstrap.