og/docs/RELEASE-VERIFICATION-CHECKPOINT-21.md

Checkpoint 21 — telemetry freshness hardening

Date: 2026-09-08

Scope

Checkpoint 21 hardens the optional remote worker telemetry path introduced in checkpoint 20. No persistent-state schema changes are introduced and the inference/quota/scheduler hot paths are unchanged.

Changes:

• parse optional external updated_at,
• reject samples older than max(30s, 6 x health_interval),
• reject timestamps more than 30 seconds in the future,
• keep backward compatibility for exporters without timestamps,
• append external HTTP/decode/freshness errors instead of overwriting an existing collector warning,
• send Cache-Control: no-store and X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff from the shipped telemetry agent.

Safety behavior

A rejected external sample is not merged into ResourceTelemetry. Static worker capacity hints, Ollama health/inventory and all other routing inputs remain available. The worker remains usable; the telemetry error is surfaced for operators.

Verification

Release verification includes unit tests for fresh/stale/future/missing timestamps, merge semantics, full repository tests/vet, race tests, release cross-builds, dist checksums and a real gateway + mock Ollama + telemetry-agent smoke path.

E2E freshness evidence

Fresh-agent path:

• agent response included Cache-Control: no-store,
• source was telemetry-url:host-memory+amdgpu-sysfs,
• simulated VRAM/GPU/temperature/power values were merged correctly.

Stale-exporter path:

• exporter was made ready before gateway startup,
• payload timestamp was intentionally more than one hour old,
• gateway reported telemetry sample is stale: ... exceeds 30s,
• stale VRAM/GPU pressure values were not merged,
• gateway still shut down cleanly with exit status 0.