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fix(net): track tail hardening - #4533

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@kixelated kixelated commented Sep 29, 2026 •

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Closes the Codex findings left over from the track tail PRs (#4086 JS, #4116 Rust) and settles the quest's three open questions in both languages.

Bugs

  • Rust IETF publisher, END_OF_TRACK not cancellable. The marker now races the request stream and the session, like the group serving before it. A subscriber that leaves while it waits for uni-stream credit ends the request. Regression: ietf_leaving_cancels_a_blocked_end_of_track (mock gains withhold_unis).
  • Rust IETF publisher, stream count. END_OF_TRACK counts into opened once its stream opens, like every group stream. JS already did this.
  • Rust IETF subscriber, truncated first object. A peek failure other than END_OF_TRACK creates and aborts the named group. JS already did this. There is no regression test: the model hides an aborted group from readers and releases its sequence, so nothing a reader can observe changes. See the follow-ups.
  • Rust IETF fill handoff. A tail parked on its fill held nothing open, and the fill let go once it installed the head, so the subscription could settle before the tail claimed it. An outstanding fill is now owed, and the tail resumes before it takes the head. Regression: an_unclaimed_fill_holds_the_end_open.
  • Rust grace cuts off an arrived stream. Tail now tracks active streams through a Reading guard, opened at the header on both lite and IETF, and Settle never returns while one is being read. This matches Tail.settle in JS. An IETF stream parked in claim_fill on another stream stops holding the end open, so a lost fill cannot wedge the subscription. Regression: the_grace_waits_for_a_stream_being_read.
  • Lite owed floor (JS, and Rust had the mirror hole). The owed range now starts at the floor the demand last asked for, or at SUBSCRIBE_START for a live-edge demand. When SUBSCRIBE_START arrives, the groups the SUBSCRIBE asked for below it are accounted as unavailable. That covers "asked below the announced start" without Math.max. JS dropped groups that an update newly asked for. Rust used SUBSCRIBE_START alone, so it also waited out the grace for groups that a raised floor no longer asked for. Regressions: JS a lowered floor owes the groups it newly asked for (fails on main) and a floor below SUBSCRIBE_START owes nothing below it, plus Rust the_owed_floor_follows_the_demand.

Open questions

  1. Are lost datagrams owed? No. Behaviour doesn't change. Neither tail can tell a lost datagram from a stream reset before its header, so the hole holds the subscription for the grace on lite-05/06, and lite-07's count ignores it. A test confirmed the report that "Rust does not wait", but the reason isn't the tail. The Rust model ends a reader once the live edge reaches the declared end, so a hole below the edge never delays the reader. It only delays the subscription's teardown. JS readers wait until the track closes. a_lost_datagram_never_delays_the_end locks in the Rust side. The reader-visible difference is a model difference, listed below.
  2. A group at or past the declared end aborts the track with ProtocolViolation in both languages, on IETF and on lite from lite-06 (see below). The quest said Rust already did this. A probe showed it didn't: Rust returned Closed for that stream and ended the track cleanly, the same as JS. Rust now maps create_group's Closed to a track abort. Local finishes can't hit this, because the tail waits for every open reader before the subscriber finishes the track itself. JS checks the end the peer declared (SUBSCRIBE_END, or END_OF_TRACK recorded on the subscription). Tests in all four places.
  3. Tail memory is bounded by folding every gap older than the grace. Each run records when the gap below it opened. Splitting a gap keeps its age, and a gap a lowered floor newly asks for restarts its age (demand). account folds expired gaps, and so does settle on entry. The grace comes from the tail itself: lite keeps it in step with the subscription's max age (in Rust through set_grace on create, update, and FIN; in JS through a getter), and IETF uses the fixed one second. Settle reads its grace from the tail, so the two can't disagree.

Public API and wire impact

  • Public API: none. tail is pub(crate) in Rust and @internal in JS. The JS Tail constructor now takes { grace, now }, and settle dropped its grace argument.
  • Wire: none. The IETF Stream Count may now include an END_OF_TRACK stream that failed after opening, which the drafts already require.
  • Docs: doc/concept/moq-lite.md subscription completion.

lite-05 inclusive end

Two decisions are gated by version, following the maintainer's call. From lite-06 on, both languages abort the track with ProtocolViolation when a SUBSCRIBE_END lands below a group already received, and when a group lands at or past the declared end. On lite-05 both only warn, or drop that one group, and the track still finishes clean. The reason is that lite-05 specified an inclusive end, and @moq/net 0.1.3 to 0.1.9 sent one: #2333 fixed the JS publisher after those releases shipped.

  • Before this change, Rust lite only warned on every version. JS lite aborted on every version, which broke a lite-05 track ending from those publishers.
  • Tests cover lite-05, lite-06 and lite-07 in Rust (a_subscribe_end_below_a_received_group, a_group_past_the_declared_end_aborts_the_track) and in the JS lite tail tests.
  • The draft's lite-06 changelog already records the inclusive-to-exclusive correction, so it needs no further note. doc/concept/moq-lite.md now states the rule.

Follow-ups

  • Reader-visible end across languages. Rust readers see the end once the live edge reaches it. JS readers wait until the track closes, and that includes the tail grace. Recommendation: a quest to pick one.
  • Aborted groups are invisible after the fact. An aborted group releases its sequence and is skipped by arrival readers, so "create and abort" can't tell a reader that a group was lost. Recommendation: fold this into SUBSCRIBE_DROP, where dropped groups get a reader-visible form.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

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kixelated and others added 4 commits September 29, 2026 11:00
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cancel an IETF END_OF_TRACK stuck on stream credit with the request, count it
once opened, abort a group whose first object is cut short, and hold the tail
open while any stream is still being read. A group at or past the declared end
aborts the track. The lite owed floor follows the demand, and tail gaps older
than the grace fold away.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A group at or past the declared end aborts the track, the lite owed floor
follows the demand with the groups below SUBSCRIBE_START accounted, and tail
gaps older than the grace fold away. Finishes the track tail hardening quest.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A SUBSCRIBE_END below a received group, or a group at or past the declared
end, aborts the track on lite-06 and later in both languages. lite-05
specified an inclusive end, and @moq/net 0.1.3 to 0.1.9 sent one, so there
it only warns or drops that group.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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kixelated marked this pull request as ready for review September 29, 2026 20:14
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  • js/net/src/tail.ts
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Walkthrough

Rust and JavaScript tail tracking now records timestamped gaps and active stream reads during settlement. IETF and moq-lite subscribers update group accounting and enforce track-end rules, with moq-lite behavior varying by draft version. IETF publisher handling of END_OF_TRACK and mock-session controls also change. Tests and documentation cover completion behavior and reader-end parity.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to 3ec31

IETF subscriptions can finish prematurely while a fill remains outstanding. Resolve the grace-expiry and fill-handoff interaction before merging.

Security Architecture Review

Security architecture risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to 3ec31

The changes improve stream-completion accounting, but the Rust completion wait appears able to retain an abandoned subscription when a publisher stalls an already-arrived stream. The exposure is within established subscriptions; no privilege escalation or cross-tenant access was established.

Retained concerns

  • Medium · security · inferred: Rust’s post-PUBLISH_DONE settlement wait appears able to strand an abandoned subscription. A publisher can deliver a group header, stall the remaining stream, and complete the request control path. Active-read accounting then prevents grace settlement, while the inner wait no longer checks whether local readers have left. Track completion and subscription removal remain behind that wait. Previously, grace bounded this state; the new gate may retain receive tasks, stream ownership, and subscription routing until explicit track closure or session failure.
Security review details

Security Blast Radius

  • inferred — The identified retention path requires a publisher serving an established Rust IETF subscription. Its immediate scope is that subscription’s stream handlers and ownership state; repetition could increase resource pressure within the receiving process. The inspected path does not establish access to another tenant, additional credentials, or privileged infrastructure.

Security Findings and Attack Paths

  • inferred — A publishing peer can stall an arrived group stream while sending successful PUBLISH_DONE. Settlement then waits on active ownership beyond grace. If local readers leave during this interval, the inner wait does not check local-unused state, unlike the outer request loop. This appears to weaken cancellation-based failure containment, although the complete model-level reader-drop path was not verified.

Trust Boundaries and Controls

  • observed — Subscription lookup and protocol-end validation remain concrete controls. Retired JavaScript IETF aliases stop late streams, and end violations close the owning track rather than allowing data beyond its declared boundary.

Resilience and Maintainability Implications

  • observed — Explicit closure remains a recovery mechanism: Rust fill ingestion races track closure and marks the fill done on failure, while session-state abort drains subscriptions, rejects pending requests, and aborts owned producers. This limits the retention concern when those recovery paths execute, but does not prove local abandonment triggers them during settlement.
🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name Status Explanation Resolution
Docstring Coverage ⚠️ Warning Docstring coverage is 77.78% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 63 functions across 12 files. (1 skipped:… Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.
✅ Passed checks (4 passed)
Check name Status Explanation
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly and concisely identifies the main change: hardening track-tail handling in the networking code.
Description check ✅ Passed The description is directly related to the changeset and explains the Rust and JavaScript fixes, version-specific behavior, tests, documentation updates, and follow-ups.
Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

Docstring coverage is 77.78% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 63 functions across 12 files. (1 skipped: 1 unsupported.)

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Codex Review Summary

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Review Status Commit Review trigger
📝 Code Review ✅ Completed 2026-09-29T22:32:06.769971Z 3ec3169 New commits
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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

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Comment thread js/net/src/tail.ts
runs.push(run);
} else if (end < run.start) {
// Splitting a gap leaves both halves as late as it was.
if (!placed) runs.push(merged ?? { start, end, since: run.since });

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P1 Badge Reset gap age when demand expands

When a long-lived subscription lowers its floor after the existing run has aged beyond the grace, copying run.since makes newly requested holes look already expired. For example, after group 3's run is old, lowering the floor to 1 and receiving group 1 immediately folds missing group 2 into the surrounding runs, so a following FIN sees covers(1, 4) as true and closes before group 2 can arrive. Start aging that gap when demand expands, and make the equivalent correction in rs/moq-net/src/tail.rs; otherwise the new lowered-floor behavior can lose late groups.

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Agreed, fixed in 03bd421. Tail::demand / Tail.demand restarts the age of every gap a lowered floor reaches into, called from the lite update path in both languages. Unit tests with an injected clock cover the scenario.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

await respond({ end: new SubscribeEnd(4, 1) });
await fin();
// Long enough for a subscription that owed nothing more to have ended.
await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 50));

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P1 Badge Replace the wall-clock synchronization with mocked time

This 50 ms sleep is the synchronization that determines whether the regression catches the old early-close behavior. On a loaded CI runner, a broken subscription may not finish teardown before the sleep returns, allowing groups 1 and 2 to arrive first and making the test pass spuriously. Advance mocked time and drain the relevant tasks deterministically instead of depending on scheduler timing.

AGENTS.md reference: AGENTS.md:L19-L19

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Declining. The mock transport is in-process with no timers, so the broken teardown is a microtask chain: every queued microtask drains before any timer fires, and a loaded runner only delays the timer, never the chain. The 50 ms is an event-loop drain, not a race. The age logic itself is now covered with an injected clock in tail.test.ts.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

kixelated and others added 2 commits September 29, 2026 14:09
A gap the demand newly asks for was aging from the run above it, so a floor
lowered on a long-lived subscription could fold the new gap away at once and
end the subscription before its groups arrived.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

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reading: &mut Reading,
) -> Result<Option<group::Producer>, Error> {
kio::wait(|waiter| {
reading.park();

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P1 Badge Keep the fill-to-subgroup handoff continuously active

When an IETF fill completes, recv_fill installs Fill::Ready and then drops its Reading guard, while this parked subgroup does not call resume() until its separately scheduled task wakes. In that gap active can be zero with the full Stream Count received, so Settle may finish the track and remove the subscription before the subgroup claims the fill, losing the tail of the joined group. Transfer active ownership without a zero-count window and model-check this handoff interleaving.

AGENTS.md reference: rs/moq-net/AGENTS.md:L15-L15

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Agreed, the window was real. Fixed in the next push:

  • Settle treats an outstanding fill as owed (poll_settled), so a head that is Ready but unclaimed holds the end open. Nothing else does, since its tail is parked. A head that is never claimed falls back to the grace.
  • claim_fill resumes its Reading before it takes the head, so the fill turning Done never lands while nothing is active.

A loom model can't reach this path: tests/loom.rs drives only the public model API, and Fill, Tail and claim_fill are private. an_unclaimed_fill_holds_the_end_open pins the interleaving deterministically instead. It parks the tail, finishes the fill, and asserts that Settle is still pending. It fails without the fix.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

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Comment thread rs/moq-net/src/tail.rs
Comment on lines +75 to +76
pub fn set_grace(&mut self, grace: Duration) {
self.grace = grace;

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P1 Badge Preserve expired gaps when increasing grace

When a lite subscription increases max_age, set_grace only replaces the duration even though expire may already have permanently merged older gaps into accounted runs. For example, a gap can be folded while the grace is 100 ms, then an update can raise it to 1 s; if the publisher's FIN arrives before that delayed stream header, covers is already true and the subscription closes immediately instead of honoring the new grace, dropping the late group. The TypeScript tail has the same irreversible merge while reading grace dynamically, so increasing the grace must preserve or reconstruct such gaps in both implementations.

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Declining, as a deliberate trade-off. A gap folds only after it has outlived the grace in force at the time. At that point the tail has given up on its group, the same way the subscription's max age gives up on a stale group. Folding is what bounds the tail's memory. That was the quest's third open question, and keeping the exact gaps would undo that bound. The only case this leaves open is a group missing for longer than the grace that later becomes owed again or gets a longer grace, and the tail won't wait for it at teardown. The Tail docs in both languages now say a fold is final.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

A tail parked on its fill stops holding the end open, and the fill's own stream
let go once it installed the head, so the subscription could settle and end
before the tail woke to claim it. An outstanding fill is now owed, and the tail
resumes before it takes the head.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

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Actionable comments posted: 1


  • 🪄 Fix CodeRabbit comments on this PR
🤖 Prompt to fix review comments
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Inline comments:
Review comments at @rs/moq-net/src/ietf/subscriber.rs:
- Line 2955: Update Settle::poll and its completion predicate in run_subscribe
so a ready head with a parked tail blocks settlement even after grace expires,
while the timeout still applies when streams are missing. Extend the regression
test to cover grace expiring before the fill completes.

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fn poll_settled(settle: &mut Settle, waiter: &kio::Waiter, fill: &kio::Producer<Fill>, count: u64) -> Poll<()> {
// Read before the tail: Done is terminal, so the answer cannot go stale.
let filled = !fill.read().outstanding();
settle.poll(waiter, |tail| filled && count > 0 && tail.streams() >= count)

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🗄️ Data Integrity & Integration | 🟠 Major | ⚡ Quick win

Preserve the fill-to-tail handoff after grace expires.

Settle::poll in rs/moq-net/src/tail.rs (Lines 227–235) ignores this completion predicate after grace expires. If the fill takes longer than grace, its completion leaves Fill::Ready with no active reads while the tail remains parked. Settlement can then win before the tail resumes. run_subscribe finishes the track, and the remaining tail objects are discarded.

Make a ready head with a parked tail block settlement even after grace expires. Preserve the timeout for missing streams. Extend the regression test to cover grace expiring before the fill completes.

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only still-valid issues, skip the rest with a brief reason, keep changes
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Review comment at @rs/moq-net/src/ietf/subscriber.rs at line 2955:
Update Settle::poll and its completion predicate in run_subscribe so a ready
head with a parked tail blocks settlement even after grace expires, while the
timeout still applies when streams are missing. Extend the regression test to
cover grace expiring before the fill completes.

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Comment thread js/net/src/tail.ts
Comment on lines +92 to +95
this.#runs = this.#runs.map((run) => {
const reached = below < end && start < run.start;
below = run.end;
return reached ? { ...run, since: now } : run;

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P2 Badge Reopen gaps erased before demand returns

When a floor is raised and later lowered again, this only retimestamps gaps that still exist between runs. If groups 1 and 3 previously arrived, missing group 2 aged past the grace, and #expire folded the runs, demand(1, 3) sees one continuous run and cannot recreate the hole. A following FIN therefore makes covers(1, end) true and closes the subscription before the newly requested group 2 can arrive. Preserve enough gap information or explicitly reopen the newly demanded span; the Rust Tail::demand has the same issue.

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Declining, as a deliberate trade-off. A gap folds only after it has outlived the grace in force at the time. At that point the tail has given up on its group, the same way the subscription's max age gives up on a stale group. Folding is what bounds the tail's memory. That was the quest's third open question, and keeping the exact gaps would undo that bound. The only case this leaves open is a group missing for longer than the grace that later becomes owed again or gets a longer grace, and the tail won't wait for it at teardown. The Tail docs in both languages now say a fold is final.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@kixelated

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Merge summary.

Changes during takeover:

  • 03bd421: a lowered floor restarts the age of the gap it reaches into (Tail::demand / Tail.demand), so newly requested groups are not folded away on arrival.
  • 9c0fbc8: merged main. The only conflict was quest/m1/README.md, where both sides had removed a finished quest.
  • 3c144e6: the IETF fill handoff no longer leaves a window where nothing holds the end open. An outstanding fill is owed, and the tail resumes before it claims the head. Regression: an_unclaimed_fill_holds_the_end_open.
  • 9d2f0a7: the Tail docs say a fold is final.

Decisions:

  • Declined the 50 ms test sleep finding. The mock transport has no timers, so the sleep only lets pending microtasks drain.
  • Declined a loom model for the fill handoff. The types involved are private, and the deterministic regression pins the interleaving.
  • Declined reopening folded gaps when the grace grows or the floor is lowered again. This is a deliberate trade-off for bounded tail memory.

Follow-ups are already planned as quests in this PR: reader-end-parity, and visible dropped groups under subscribe-drop.

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

@kixelated
kixelated enabled auto-merge (squash) September 29, 2026 22:25
@kixelated
kixelated merged commit f3577c9 into main Sep 29, 2026
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kixelated deleted the quest/m1/track-tail-hardening branch September 29, 2026 23:59
@moq-bot moq-bot Bot mentioned this pull request Sep 30, 2026
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