Commit Graph
1 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jcoffey-dev 0698235d4c Run the recovery cycle in a container
The second implementation of the launcher seam: a throwaway container from
the staged image, against the live container's own mounts, with recovery
mode's two environment variables. Everything the cycle does afterwards -
the settings apply, the health check, the boot check - is unchanged, which
was the point of putting the seam there.

Process gained an unexported start(cmd, what) so a container shares its
supervision rather than reimplementing it. For a container the child
process is the `docker run` client, so the captured output is the server's
own: a recovery boot that dies on a bind conflict says so here, where a
detached container would have left it in `docker logs` for nobody.

Stopping is the part that needed care, because the client and the container
are two things and conflating them loses a store. Signals do reach the
container through an attached client, so the ordinary path is fine - but
Process.Stop escalates to SIGKILL when the grace period expires, and
killing the client does not kill the container. It would be left running,
holding the store open, while the run moved on to the next phase believing
it had stopped. So the container is stopped by name with docker's own
timeout, and its absence confirmed afterwards; a container still running
after being told to stop is an error loud enough to halt the run, because
nothing may touch that data until it is gone.

Two refusals rather than defaults. No image, and no mounts - the second
because a recovery container with no mounts would migrate an empty
directory and report success, which is the worst outcome available here.

Eight tests drive a fake docker: the assembled run command, recovery
variables present in recovery mode and absent in an ordinary boot, both
refusals, the stop reaching the container by name, the survived-container
error, an already-removed container being the normal --rm path rather than
a failure, and output capture.

Two races in those tests are worth recording, because both were real and
neither was in the code. Launch returns once the OS has started the client,
which is before the shell it started has run anything, so reading the
invocation log or the output immediately raced them; both now poll. And a
forked `sleep` in the fake outlived its shell, held the output pipe open
and made Wait block for the sleep's full duration - `exec` in the fake
fixes it, and the same shape would affect any child that forks.
2026-08-28 17:13:20 -07:00