Capture the PTY leader's ProcessIdentity and its own session group
immediately after spawn, while the child is held unreaped, and drive
teardown from that frozen record instead of re-deriving the group from
proc.pid. Every signal re-verifies the leader: OWNED and still leading
the group signals the group; GONE signals only the recorded group, never
the pid; FOREIGN proves the group's lifetime ended and nothing is
signalled; UNVERIFIABLE or a missing spawn identity signals nothing.
The server's own process group is never recorded or signalled.
Extract the generic process lifecycle layer (src/process_lifecycle.py)
shared by runtime-owned subprocesses: process identity (pid + boot-bound
start token), identity-bound observation, group and pidfd probes, the
TERM -> verify -> KILL -> verify escalation with re-gating before
escalation, identity-scoped sweeps, and the termination receipt.
Containment, the PTY shell, the Cookbook survivor sweep, the browser
lifecycle, web_tools browser cleanup, kill_process_tree and the startup
reaper consume it while keeping their own ownership semantics.
Safety corrections:
- browser membership and identity are bound in one snapshot; no identity
is recaptured after membership is decided
- web_tools legacy pid-file and profile-match kills signal only verified
identities; browser CLI groups only while their spawn identity verifies
- Cookbook and legacy-tmux descendant capture bind membership to identity
- PTY teardown never signals the server's own process group
- unverifiable processes are reported, never signalled
- Narrowly guard _request_privileges() in routes/chat_routes.py against
synthetic requests lacking scope['app'] or auth manager state, safely
returning empty privileges without granting agent privileges.
- Add focused regression test in tests/test_context_resolution_route.py
verifying that requests without app scope do not crash and cannot gain
agent privileges or qualify for compact preview runtime.
- Regenerate website/configuration-reference.md mechanically to align with
current source line numbers.
The chat route repeated the compact (clean v3) eligibility decision inline
to prepare the turn's context resolution, while the agent loop dispatched
on the contract stamp set by a separate, later condition. The two could
drift, and already disagreed for a user whose privileges demote the turn
to plain chat: the route prepared a compact resolution that no compact
runtime used.
src/agent_runtime/runtime_selection.py (no imports) now owns the rule:
- uses_compact_preview_runtime(): clean route requested, contract policy
enabled, agent mode, agent permitted, not an image generation session.
- is_compact_preview_contract() and COMPACT_PREVIEW_MODE for the stamp.
The route evaluates the rule once, before context preparation, where all
of its facts are final (the agent privilege is read through the same
_request_privileges helper the later enforcement uses). That one value
gates the typed context resolution and is the _clean_v3_preview flag that
stamps the contract; inside the agent-contract branch it equals the
previous condition, so stamping behavior is unchanged. The agent loop
dispatches through is_compact_preview_contract(), and the compact runtime's
MODE is the shared constant.
A route-level matrix drives the real agent loop and asserts that route
preparation and compact dispatch agree for compact, escalated, configured
compact/full, regular, TUI, privilege-denied and image-generation turns.
The first checkpoint removed terminal-metrics discovery, but a normal
compact chat turn still ran two context systems: build_chat_context's
legacy untyped lookup (directly or inside maybe_compact) and the typed
resolver inside stream_preview.
Resolve the typed ContextResolution once, at the chat route, before
build_chat_context, using the session's provider credentials. The
predicate mirrors _clean_v3_preview; every input it needs is known at
that point and the native-workspace term cannot veto a requested clean
route. The same object then:
- sizes legacy history shaping in build_chat_context through a new
maybe_compact(context_length=...) override, so no legacy probe runs;
an unknown window still shapes with DEFAULT_CONTEXT but gains no
provenance;
- crosses stream_agent_loop (one new parameter, forwarded only at the
compact dispatch) into stream_preview, which reuses it and probes only
for callers that arrive without one or with one bound to another
route.
ContextResolution now records the endpoint and model it describes
(endpoint URL excluded from repr and metrics). The bare legacy
context_length is never converted into typed evidence.
Credential scoping: origins compare with default ports normalized, an
empty host is never trusted, and the probe client never follows
redirects. Tests cover the configured origin, the server-resolved
Tailscale form, scheme/port/lookalike/userinfo/path origins, redirects,
and secret-free errors, logs and metrics.
The conftest guard now replaces only the resolver's I/O edges (HTTP
client and DNS-capable URL building) instead of the whole probe, and
exposes a context_probe_ledger fixture, so route integration tests run
the real resolver offline and can count metadata requests.
The compact (clean v3) runtime had no effective context window: it learned a
limit only reactively from a provider 400/413 and its terminal metrics carried
no context_length. PR #41 addressed the reporting gap by probing provider
metadata between the last model byte and [DONE], unauthenticated, and folded
known-table and endpoint evidence into one "known" flag.
Resolve the window once, before the first model request, instead:
- src/agent_runtime/context_resolution.py adds a typed ContextResolution
(effective value, evidence class, source, all observations, conflicts,
provider_io, cached, secret-free probe errors). Evidence classes stay
distinct: runtime_confirmed (llama.cpp /slots, /props, or a limit the
provider stated this turn), provider_advertised (models catalog),
operator_declared (client_runtime_context.model_context_window),
known_table, unknown (0, never a default).
- Selection is deterministic: runtime beats provider beats table; an
operator declaration caps measured evidence and replaces weaker evidence.
Disagreements are recorded as conflicts; a declaration below a measured
value is a cap, above it a contradiction.
- The provider probe forwards the turn's credentials only to the provider's
own origin, runs URL resolution off the event loop, is bounded by one
deadline, never raises, and caches remote results per credential
fingerprint (shorter TTL for failures; local servers are re-probed).
- stream_preview resolves at preparation (or accepts a supplied resolution),
seeds the proactive trim budget from it when evidence is not unknown, and
terminal metrics report only the stored resolution plus any limit the
provider stated during the turn. Metrics perform no discovery.
src/agent_loop.py and the regular runtime's legacy model_context probe are
unchanged. A conftest guard keeps tests that drive the compact runtime with
placeholder endpoints from performing real DNS/HTTP lookups.
A batch whose open succeeded but whose later command failed was recorded
as a failed navigation, so a following observation was wrongly labelled
stale. Use the per-command rows; when the outcome cannot be determined,
treat the page as unknown instead of claiming either result.
Own each agent-browser session as a browser tree: the daemon's POSIX
session, its runtime files and its Chrome profile. Timeouts, launch
failures, bootstrap recovery, cancellation and shutdown clean that tree
and verify nothing survives, instead of killing only the daemon and
orphaning Chrome. Per-call cleanup no longer sweeps every Chrome under
the runtime TMPDIR.
Sessionless calls get an ephemeral browser closed before returning.
Actions on one session are serialized. Recovery is bounded by one
deadline with at most one retry for local HTML open, and the retry flag
is no longer model-visible. Observations after a failed navigation are
marked stale. read URL navigates and extracts in one batch because
agent-browser has no read command. Results carry a browser_lifecycle
receipt with stages, timings, ownership and cleanup evidence.
Playwright MCP tool calls are bounded by
ODYSSEUS_BROWSER_MCP_CALL_TIMEOUT_S and are not retried. research_navigator
now passes timeout_ms.
"Is this path inside that root" is asked in twenty places in this tree and
answered twenty times by a locally written realpath/commonpath pair. Nine test
files exist because nine call sites each needed their own proof. Each one is
defensible alone; together they are the defect, because the boundary has no
single definition and a site that gets a detail wrong is wrong by itself.
src/path_confinement.py is that definition, and it settles the details the
copies disagreed on. Both sides get canonicalized: comparing a realpath-ed
candidate against a root that was only abspath-ed is the macOS /tmp ->
/private/tmp mismatch that has already produced a false failure here, and
canonicalizing one side is worse than canonicalizing neither. commonpath rather
than startswith, because /a/bc begins with /a/b and is not inside it. A relative
candidate joins the root rather than os.getcwd(), which is whatever directory
the server happens to be running in. NUL and newline are refused with a reason
instead of caught by a bare `except Exception` and reported as an ordinary
escape. Eighteen call sites go through it now. It deliberately does not decide
whether a path is sensitive -- that deny list answers "allowed" rather than
"inside", and it stays with src/tool_execution, which owns it. The one
commonpath left in the tree, in src/workspace_paths.py, stays: that function
translates a host path into a container path, so canonicalizing either side
would change the relative path it computes and break the mapping. It is not a
confinement check.
Two of those sites were weaker than the rest and are fixed rather than moved.
The email attachment check used abspath, which folds `..` but does not resolve
symlinks, so a symlink written into the extraction directory passed it and was
then read through. The skill-reference guard compared a realpath-ed target
against a raw dirname, so on a host where the skills tree is reached through a
symlink the two sides never matched and the guard could not fire.
The execution boundary had two separate holes.
The workspace namespace bound /home and /mnt read-write. On the one platform
where that namespace engages at all, a command inside it reaches outside the
workspace and writes to the user's home directory -- measured by running this
argv on a Linux host with working bubblewrap, not inferred from the source.
Binding the user's whole home directory into a workspace-confinement namespace
gives back most of what the namespace was for. Both are read-only now. The
workspace is also bound writable at its real host path, not only at /workspace:
BashTool's own /tmp redirect rewrites `/tmp/` to `<agent_cwd()>/.tmp/` before
the namespace is built, so the command bwrap receives already names the real
path, and those writes previously landed only because the workspace happened to
sit under the writable /home.
`namespaced or _replace_workspace_alias(...)` chose between a mount namespace
and a regex with nothing in the result saying which one ran. The fallback
rewrites the literal token /workspace in the command string, so a command that
never mentions /workspace is untouched by it and runs on the host unrestricted
-- which is every agent shell command on macOS. Both tools now ask
containment.probe() instead of each deciding for itself, and every bash and
python result carries a containment block naming the mechanism and stating
whether the filesystem dimension actually held. Under enforcing mode the
command is not run and the result says so.
That block reports the filesystem dimension only, and says so in a
reported_dimensions field. The probe knows this host could also give a process
group and a real wall clock, but these two tools still assemble their own
create_subprocess_* call and pass neither, so listing those dimensions would be
exactly the false claim src/containment.py calls worse than an honest absence.
probe() is new on src/containment.py: the same mechanism table and the same
arithmetic as acquire(), stopping before the side effects. acquire() is the
wrong shape for a decision -- it writes a durable grant record, and a record
whose pid is never filled in and whose release() never runs is an entry a
restart reaper keeps finding.
CONTAINMENT_MODE stays report_only. Flipping it refuses every agent shell
command on macOS and on any Linux host without bubblewrap, which is a product
decision rather than a code one.
Smaller things in the same area: the /tmp redirect's makedirs was unguarded, so
a read-only workspace turned a command that merely mentioned `/tmp/` into an
OSError traceback instead of a tool error; it degrades now. WORKSPACE_MOUNT
moved to src/constants.py so the namespace and the path resolvers read one
definition of the contract rather than two. The ".tmp" dirname got a constant,
since it appeared in both tool paths.
One generated artifact moved with it: website/configuration-reference.md pins
the source line where each ODYSSEUS_* variable is read, and three of those
shifted. Regenerated with scripts/generate_env_reference.py; the diff is line
numbers only.
Three existing tests changed. test_workspace_artifact_tool_floor asserted that
an unsafe interpreter prefix produces no `--ro-bind <prefix> <prefix>`, which
now fires on /home because /home is legitimately a read-only base mount.
Asserting the absence of a literal flag string cannot distinguish "the prefix
was rejected" from "the argv mounted that root itself", so it compares the argv
against the no-prefix baseline instead: an unsafe prefix must add nothing.
The Windows bash test asserted dict equality on the
whole result, which makes adding a field to every bash result impossible without
touching a test about tmux; it asserts the shape now. The personal-dir symlink
test grepped the resolver's source for the literal "os.path.realpath", which is
gone because the resolution moved into the shared boundary -- it keeps the
negative assertion that the closure must not grow its own abspath check again,
and the behavioural half now runs against the boundary, where it covers every
call site instead of one closure.
Not verified: the bubblewrap argv is asserted, not executed. There is no bwrap
on macOS, and in Docker it needs --privileged to work at all -- default and
seccomp=unconfined both fail with "Creating new namespace failed", and
--cap-add=SYS_ADMIN fails at pivot_root. The Python tool's
needs_virtual_namespace gate means ordinary Python code gets no namespace even
on a Linux host that could provide one; that is reported now but deliberately
not changed, because it alters the Linux Python path on every call and cannot be
checked from here.
A recorded pid is a claim, not a handle. The containment grant store, the
background-job store and the Cookbook task list all outlive the process that
wrote them — deliberately, so a restart keeps a job and its result — and the
kernel reuses pids. Any teardown driven off one of those records can therefore
land on a process we never started. ODY-86 was exactly this, and the Cookbook
survivor sweep still terminated any process whose full command line matched a
tracked one, which is the same mistake spelled differently.
Identity is (pid, start token). The token comes from /proc/<pid>/stat on Linux,
ps -o lstart= on macOS and the BSDs, and GetProcessTimes on Windows; the kernel
will not hand a pid to a process that started earlier, so comparing the token
recorded at launch against the token read now answers "is this still ours"
without a handle or a supervisor. verify() returns owned, gone, foreign or
unverifiable, and only owned permits a signal.
Keeping "unverifiable" out of the other two is the point. Process inspection
has broken off Linux four times here — ODY-70, -86, -94, -99 — every time
because an absent mechanism read as a successful answer. Folding it into "ours"
signals strangers; folding it into "gone" abandons live processes. It is a
containment failure and every caller treats it as one.
Wired into the three places that signal:
- containment.release() gates a grant recovered from the durable store, and
leaves an in-process teardown alone, where the caller holds the child and no
identity question arises. The verdict lands on the record, so "why is this
grant still here" is answerable afterwards.
- A startup reaper. Nothing read either store before, so a crashed run left
every grant permanently active and every job permanently running, and the
first thing to touch such a record was a teardown aimed at a reassigned pid.
The two stores get opposite treatment: an orphaned grant has no caller left
and is torn down, while a detached job is documented to survive a restart and
is only corrected, never killed.
- The Cookbook sweep takes its ownership from the tmux pane's process tree,
captured before the kill destroys the only link between a surviving model
server and the session that started it. A process that merely matches the
tracked command line is now reported rather than killed: the Cookbook
composed that command line, so an identical one is just as likely to be a
server the user started by hand. The sweep also runs on hosts with no procfs
instead of silently skipping, and says so when it could not look at all.
_session_alive collapsed every OSError from killpg(pgid, 0) into "the
group is gone". EPERM means the opposite — the group answered the probe
but holds a process we may not signal — so a session we could not touch
was reported as contained, and a timed-out command that left children
running said it had terminated cleanly.
Resolving PTY_KILL_ESCALATION also named signal.SIGKILL unconditionally,
which does not exist on native Windows. app.py imports this module at
start-up, so that turned a POSIX-only teardown detail into the whole app
failing to import there.
/api/shell/stream starts its PTY child under os.setsid, so the child
leads its own session and process group. The timeout, client-disconnect
and error paths all called proc.kill(), which signals only the group
leader. Creating a group and then signalling only its leader is strictly
worse than never creating one: the descendants are detached from the
server's group as well, so nothing else will ever reach them, while the
route reports "Command timed out after Ns" and exit_code -1 as if the
command were gone.
The kernel's controlling-terminal SIGHUP hid this for well-behaved
children, which is why it reads as working. Anything that ignores
SIGHUP — a nohup'ed job, a daemon, a process that means to outlive its
terminal — survives the kill indefinitely.
Signal the whole group instead, escalate to SIGKILL if it outlives the
grace period, and confirm it is actually gone. The timeout response now
says so when containment could not be established rather than claiming
a clean kill it did not get.
Agent-reachable execution has 25 independent spawn sites and no single
place deciding where a process runs or under what limits. All three
consequences are visible on this SHA. When bwrap is absent the workspace
namespace degrades to a regex that rewrites /workspace to the real path,
and nothing in the tool result says which one you got. No spawn site
passes start_new_session, so a wall-clock kill reaches the wrapper shell
and leaves its backgrounded grandchildren running while reporting the
process killed. Teardown stops at SIGTERM without ever checking death.
src/containment.py gives those paths one boundary. acquire() establishes
containment or refuses -- a string rewrite is not a mechanism it can
select -- and the grant states which dimensions actually hold, which were
best-effort and are missing, and which were required and are missing.
run() enforces the wall clock and the output cap. release() signals the
process group, escalates to SIGKILL, and reports dead only for a group it
observed go empty.
Containment never sees the command: acquire() takes a workspace and
limits, and the command text only reaches run(). Nothing in a request can
widen a boundary it is never shown.
CONTAINMENT_MODE chooses between refusing an unestablishable required
dimension and recording it. It ships report-only, so landing this changes
no behaviour on a host without bwrap -- which is every host today.
No call sites move here; they follow on this branch. The configuration
reference is regenerated because the page records src/constants.py line
numbers and the new path constant shifts two of them.
The Windows branch of `_create_bash_subprocess` spawned Git Bash with
neither pipes nor the env it was handed. `proc.stdout` and `proc.stderr`
came back `None`, so `_run_subprocess_streaming`'s reader returned
immediately and the Bash tool reported `"(no output)"` alongside the real
exit code — while the child inherited the server's own stdout/stderr and
wrote agent command output into the console and the launchd/Docker logs.
The `env` parameter was accepted and never used, so `PATH`, `VIRTUAL_ENV`,
`HOME`, `TMPDIR` and the configured import paths carried in
`ctx["subproc_env"]` never reached the child on Windows, even though every
POSIX path applies them.
Spawn it the way the POSIX path at `:688` already does: `stdin=DEVNULL`,
`stdout=PIPE`, `stderr=PIPE`, `env=env`.
`website/configuration-reference.md` is generated from source line numbers,
so the four added lines shift one entry; regenerated with
`scripts/generate_env_reference.py`.
- Headless consumers (task scheduler, background follow-up) now treat a
completion-gate final_response as the authoritative answer instead of
collecting deltas only. A gated replacement no longer leaves scheduled
output empty, which used to trigger an extra, ungated grace-summary
model call.
- The scheduler closes the agent stream with contextlib.aclosing, so the
approval-pause break unwinds the gate's journal and teacher-takeover
context in its own task. Chained runs no longer inherit a stale
parent_run_id, and later finalization no longer raises ContextVar
reset errors.
- On provider error, the completion gate applies the live answer's
statement filter to persisted round_texts. Diagnostics and the failure
note survive; claims rejected by the gate cannot reappear on reload.
Alexandre Teixeira