When a peer went idle under lazy connections, the WireGuard peer was
removed and the wake endpoint re-armed with only the overlay allowed
IPs, dropping routed prefixes installed by the route manager. The
asynchronous route-watcher re-add uses update_only, which is a silent
no-op while the peer is absent, so routed subnets stayed black-holed
until the peer was woken by other means.
Split the idle transition from the full close: Conn.Idle tears down
transports, cancels pending delayed endpoint updates and updates the
status without touching the WireGuard peer. The activity listener then
arms the wake endpoint via the new IdlePeerEndpoint operation, which
removes and re-creates the peer in a single transaction: handshake
state is dropped (keeping the handshake-first wake semantics of packet
staging and first-packet capture/reinjection) while the currently
installed allowed IPs are preserved. The read-modify-write runs under
the interface mutex, serializing it against concurrent allowed IP
updates from the route manager.
Conn.Close no longer takes signalToRemote: the idle transition is the
only path that signals GOAWAY to the remote peer.
This PR introduces a new inactivity package responsible for monitoring peer activity and notifying when peers become inactive.
Introduces a new Signal message type to close the peer connection after the idle timeout is reached.
Periodically checks the last activity of registered peers via a Bind interface.
Notifies via a channel when peers exceed a configurable inactivity threshold.
Default settings
DefaultInactivityThreshold is set to 15 minutes, with a minimum allowed threshold of 1 minute.
Limitations
This inactivity check does not support kernel WireGuard integration. In kernel–user space communication, the user space side will always be responsible for closing the connection.
With the lazy connection feature, the peer will connect to target peers on-demand. The trigger can be any IP traffic.
This feature can be enabled with the NB_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_LAZY_CONN environment variable.
When the engine receives a network map, it binds a free UDP port for every remote peer, and the system configures WireGuard endpoints for these ports. When traffic appears on a UDP socket, the system removes this listener and starts the peer connection procedure immediately.
Key changes
Fix slow netbird status -d command
Move from engine.go file to conn_mgr.go the peer connection related code
Refactor the iface interface usage and moved interface file next to the engine code
Add new command line flag and UI option to enable feature
The peer.Conn struct is reusable after it has been closed.
Change connection states
Connection states
Idle: The peer is not attempting to establish a connection. This typically means it's in a lazy state or the remote peer is expired.
Connecting: The peer is actively trying to establish a connection. This occurs when the peer has entered an active state and is continuously attempting to reach the remote peer.
Connected: A successful peer-to-peer connection has been established and communication is active.
Zoltan Papp