WIREBIND: kill the orphaned console VM when the user VM birth fails

Found live during identity-heap-capacity testing (2026-09-07,
hotplugging Zuse + 8 identities one at a time and measuring the kernel
heap arena via a temporary allocator-stats probe, since reverted): every
WIREBIND identity attach births two VMs in sequence -- a "console" VM,
then the real "user" VM. When the second birth failed (arena
fragmentation under concurrent VM load, a separate, not-yet-fixed
capacity issue), capsule_wirebind_try_attach() logged the failure and
returned, but the console VM that had *already succeeded* was never
torn down. It stays live and registered under the identity's username,
consuming its own ~228KB of the fixed 4MB kernel heap arena forever --
nothing ever points a real user at it, since WIREBIND only ever hands
the caller the user VM's id.

This turns every failed identity attach into a permanent net loss of
heap rather than a neutral retry: confirmed live that a failed attach
left the arena 228,576 bytes worse off than before the attempt, and
every subsequent attempt starts from that worse baseline, compounding.

Fix: call capsule_vm_kill(username) on the now-orphaned console VM
before returning from the failure path -- the same teardown
capsule_wirebind_eject()/capsule_wirebind_unclean_detach() already use
elsewhere in this file (vm_cleanup() + sf_free(), confirmed live to
actually reclaim per-word dictionary allocations, FABRIC-3.md
§IX.2/§IX.3).

Verified live with the same allocator-stats probe (written, captured,
reverted -- not part of this commit): after the fix, a forced user-VM
birth failure now returns the arena to exactly its pre-attempt byte
count (3,526,256, matching the baseline precisely) instead of leaking
228,576 bytes. Three-arch clean qemu acceptance (single Zuse device,
the standard regression case) passed on amd64, aarch64, and riscv64.

The underlying capacity/fragmentation question (why the 7th concurrent
identity's arena allocation fails at all despite technically-sufficient
free bytes) is a separate, open architecture question -- not addressed
here. See project memory for the full measured numbers.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014Ec88YKxxhZGG1RNnune78
This commit is contained in:
Robert Allan James
2026-09-07 11:37:06 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Sonnet 5
parent e10fb76fb2
commit d8a195b8d8
6 changed files with 26964 additions and 1 deletions
+14
View File
@@ -185,6 +185,20 @@ void capsule_wirebind_try_attach(struct blkio_dev *dev,
if (capsule_runcap_birth(dev, sig, user_vm_name, mama_vm->stadium_vm_id, &user_id,
&user_ctx) != CAPSULE_RUN_OK) {
console_println("WIREBIND: user VM birth FAILED");
/* The console VM above already succeeded and is live/registered
* under `username` -- without this, it's an orphan: nothing ever
* points a real user at it (WIREBIND only ever hands the caller
* the user VM's id), so it just sits there permanently holding
* its own kernel-heap arena allocation. Confirmed live 2026-09-07
* (identity-heap-capacity testing): this is exactly what turns a
* single failed identity attach into a permanent net loss of
* heap, compounding every subsequent attempt's odds of failing
* too, rather than a neutral retry. capsule_vm_kill() is the same
* teardown capsule_wirebind_eject()/capsule_wirebind_unclean_
* detach() already use elsewhere in this file -- vm_cleanup() +
* sf_free(), verified to actually reclaim per-word dictionary
* allocations (FABRIC-3.md §IX.2/§IX.3, 2026-09-06). */
capsule_vm_kill(username);
return;
}