Desync FAILOVER re-elections by node priority (ha_election_stagger_ms /
ha_failover_stagger_fn) mirroring the startup stagger, with seed jitter and
async prevote start; allow prevote in voter roles through the dispatch gate.
Adds HA role and vote-gate tests (stagger desync by priority, prevote on dead
primary, stickiness-lapse grants).
Pre-existing uncommitted work, committed to establish a clean baseline before
ha-commit-durability implementation.
Add OPCode_preVoteRequest case in cluster.c, mirroring the real-vote case:
freshness floor + reused eligibility/stickiness gate (raft_on_pre_vote_request),
reply over preVoteReply with the voter's UNCHANGED term (no adoption), denial
logging with candidate id + reason. Pure insertion; real-vote case untouched.
6 new vote-gate tests assert deny-while-leader-alive, grant-when-lapsed, and the
no-mutation/term-unchanged contract.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Root cause (found via ha-convergence-recovery task 8 live 3-node E2E): a
controller with no local config (config_version_tag==0) could become PRIMARY
and push an empty config, breaking replication.
Two upstream election-safety gaps, both outside ha-convergence-recovery:
1. RDHUP re-election bypassed the no-config 'voter only' guard. The startup
path (ha_start_election_async) refuses to start an election when
my_config_tag==0 && n_peers>1, but the RDHUP failover path
(ha_on_primary_ctrl_fd_rdhup) called raft_on_leader_lost unconditionally.
Fix: mirror the guard before elect_ctx alloc / hook / raft_on_leader_lost;
a config-less node stays CTRL_STANDBY (voter only) and grants the
configured peer instead of starting (and winning) its own election.
2. Voter freshness gate compared the candidate only against the voter's LOCAL
config, ignoring the cluster's known committed state. Fix: ha_vote_self_freshness
floors the comparison at max(local, learned-committed config_tag / committed_lsn),
so a voter denies any candidate whose config/cluster state is outdated vs
what the cluster has committed. Strictly additive (never denies the freshest
node — Leader Completeness preserves liveness).
TDD: test_rdhup_noconfig_node_does_not_elect + configured-node contrast;
test_ha_vote_gate learned-floor deny + liveness + backward-compat. Full
controller suite green under ASAN. commit.c and ha-convergence-recovery
files untouched.
Election protocol fixes validated against raft.tla invariants:
- ha_init_raft(): one-time raft state init at startup (re-init would lose
durable election progress); n_peers = full cluster size including self
- handle_request_vote(): higher-term step-down moved BEFORE the role gate
(split-brain fix); standby vote-deny now requires a live primary control
channel (primary_ctrl_fd >= 0) AND a fresh heartbeat
- ha_heartbeat_is_fresh(): derive freshness from ha->last_activity (the
field production actually writes); the orphaned last_heartbeat timespec
had no production writer, leaving the vote-deny gate inert (bug-337);
field removed from ha_state_t
- handle_request_vote(): restore same-candidate idempotent re-grant —
deny only a DIFFERENT candidate in the same term, matching raft.c and
Raft §5.2 votedFor ∈ {Nil, candidateId} (bug-338)
- raft_init(): restore voted_for_term alongside a persisted vote; leaving
it 0 allowed a double vote in the same term across a restart (bug-339)
- myapp_run(): leader_known check treats a vote recorded under this node's
own name as a self-vote — production persists the real candidate name,
the "self" placeholder only appears in test mode
- raft_on_vote_request(): leader steps down on higher-term vote request
instead of denying it
Tests: test_proto_H6_restored_vote_blocks_second_vote added; H1 restore
assertion strengthened; test_ha_vote_gate.c driven through last_activity +
primary_ctrl_fd (the real production fields). Full /xce-build all green
(lib + controller + scheduler + Go suites, 0 failures, ASAN clean).
deploy-ha.sh: start.sh now forwards extra args to the controller binary.
