Idunn/docs/migration.md

Migrating a target onto the current Idunn

Status as of 2026-09-05: no target has been migrated. The binary installed on yggdrasil (/usr/local/bin/idunn, 2026-09-02) is the previous generation, driven by --swarm-profile and a root shell actuator. The current binary rejects that invocation outright:

$ idunn --swarm-profile yggdrasil-local --store ...
Error: unknown Idunn command "--swarm-profile"

This document is the route from one to the other. It is written per target, because the cutover is per target — there is no flag-day.

What changes, in one paragraph

The old generation kept its target list in Rust (swarm_targets(), removed by 330e4cd) and its actuation in shell (deploy/legacy/). The current generation keeps capability in a recipe inside each target's own repository, and privilege in an operator binding on the host. Idunn seals source, builds in a runner, admits one incarnation, warms a candidate under a distinct UID and namespaces, fences the incumbent, promotes the route, and drains. Nothing in that path takes a command string.

Order

Migrate in dependency order, and migrate the authority's own dependencies last:

0. codex-connector — do not migrate. Retire it. The operator is not returning to Codex, so a credential-isolated transport for Codex subscription inference has nothing left to isolate. It is already dead in practice: the deployed daemon has been failing every three minutes with 401 ... token_expired against chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/models, with no established connections on its port. Migrating it would mean writing a binding for a corpse. See Retiring Codex below. 0b. gjallar — do not migrate. Retired 2026-09-06. Had a brief useful life on Nightwing's framebuffer, then broke and was never fixed. The Yggdrasil incarnation ran --headless --refresh-hz 2 for eleven days: a compositor with no display, recomposing twice a second, 55 minutes of CPU and 125 MB resident to produce frames nothing rendered. The only reference to gjallar.overview in the estate is one Odin test file. Stopped and disabled; 420 MB under /srv/gjallar is reclaimable.
1. heimdall, repixelizer, streampixels — first, now. They restart via docker compose, so they are the first real test of a compose-shaped workload under the systemd-transient driver.
2. ghostlight — blocked, not merely later. A world-elaboration and ontology rebuild is running in it right now: commits landed 2026-09-05 across 178 branches, with work parked on codex/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp. Adding deployment/idunn/recipe.toml to that tree collides with live work. Migrate it when the rebuild lands, and coordinate rather than assuming.
3. bifrost-persona-feedback — the only target that carries signed-release authority. Migrate it after at least three ref-head targets work, because it is the one that exercises selection = "signed-release".
4. epiphany and epiphany-capstone-17 — two targets sharing a repository. Prove the binding-per-target model here.
5. voidbot — deployed, live retrieval path, 5.7 GB of state. Not early.
6. odin — last of the targets. Idunn reads Odin's topology to gate promotion, so migrating Odin changes the thing that gates the migrations.
7. Idunn itself — the installed unit and binary. See Cutting over the authority below.

Per target

1. Fix the ref before you carry it forward

Seven of eleven targets are pinned to a codex/... branch, not main. The swarm goal is everyone on main and current with each other. A migration that copies admitted_ref = "refs/heads/codex/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp" into a binding has laundered a branch pin into a typed contract and made it harder to see.

Land the branch, or record in the binding's commit message why this target cannot be on main yet.

2. Write the recipe, in the target's repository

deployment/idunn/recipe.toml, schema gamecult.idunn.target_declaration.v1. It declares capability only — steps, artifacts, service argument shape, health contract, state slots, provides. It must name no host path, no image, and no privilege; TargetDeclaration::parse rejects unknown fields, and a recipe that reaches for host authority is rejected by admit() rather than honoured.

Several targets already have one. Recipes exist in Odin, Ghostlight, Ghostlight-interruptfu, CodexConnector, and the four Ghostlight-worlds variants — eight in total. So recipe authoring is not the bottleneck for those targets; the missing halves are the operator bindings and the daemon cutover.

Read CodexConnector/deployment/idunn/recipe.toml before writing a new one. It is the richest worked example — it carries [[external_inputs]] pinned by sha256, a non-Rust runner, and a typed credential-store schema — and since that target is being retired rather than migrated, it is a reference with no live claim on it. Odin's is the minimal example.

3. Write the binding, on the host

/etc/gamecult/idunn/bindings/<target>.toml, schema gamecult.idunn.operator_binding.v2. This is where privilege lives: origin and admitted ref, the runner image pinned by digest, workload roots and hardening, runtime trust anchor, route, brakes, rollout, placement, and the profiles this target joins.

Two brake stores, and they must differ:

[brakes]
deployment_store = "/var/lib/gamecult/idunn-authority/<target>-deployment-brake.cc"
lifecycle_store  = "/var/lib/gamecult/idunn-authority/<target>-lifecycle-brake.cc"

A binding naming one store for both is rejected — "deployment and lifecycle brakes are identical". That rejection is the doctrine the old generation could not express: a deployment brake must not be able to suspend daemon survival.

The binding must name every affordance the recipe's runners derive. Omitting one fails admit(). This is deliberate — a compromised target repository can change what gets built, but not what it may touch.

4. Dry-run, then admit

idunn up <target> --requested-by "$USER" --no-wait
idunn status --command <id>

Verify before promotion, not after: the candidate must hold a distinct UID, PID namespace and mount namespace from the incumbent (prove_isolation), and signed warming presence must be observed before the fence. If the target cannot publish signed health yet, that is the work — not a reason to widen the trust anchor.

5. Retire the legacy path for that target

Remove its line from the sudoers Cmnd_Alias, then its case arm, then its manifest under /srv/odin/deploy-manifests/. Sudoers first: the grant is the privileged half and must not outlive its consumer.

Validate with visudo -c -f before installing, and diff the resulting grant set against a backup afterwards. Removing the last entry from a Cmnd_Alias leaves a dangling \ continuation, and repairing that by hand is how you silently drop a * from a neighbouring grant and break a live target's deploy path — as happened here on 2026-09-06 to deploy streampixels, caught by diffing and not by reading.

Why retirement forces the migration

The previous generation cannot express that a target is retired. Its target list is compiled into the binary; idunn --help on the installed daemon offers restart and redeploy and no way to remove a daemon from supervision. So when codex-connector was stopped on 2026-09-05, the supervisor immediately began deciding:

Idunn decision for yggdrasil-codex-connector: restart
  (health is failed; restart authority is available)

— eighty log lines in ten minutes, against a service deliberately retired. The only brake that generation has is the deployment brake, and doctrine forbids using it here: a deployment brake must not suspend continuity. Retiring a target means suspending continuity for that target only, which is exactly what the current generation's lifecycle brake is, and exactly what the old one lacks.

Until cutover, the available mitigation is to remove the sudo grant, so the restart attempts fail at the privilege boundary rather than half-succeeding. That is a compensator, not an owner, and it is worth noticing that the estate found the argument for its own migration by trying to throw something away.

Gjallar, by contrast, was handled correctly, because its failure classified as dependency-unavailable rather than failed:

Idunn decision for yggdrasil-gjallar: alarm
  (local restart/deploy is not the owner of this failure)

Alarm, not resurrection. The distinction the old generation can draw is between failures it owns and failures it does not — not between a target that is broken and a target that is finished.

Cutting over the authority

Idunn last, and not by deploying Idunn with Idunn.

1. Build the current Idunn on Linux and stage it beside the running one — do not overwrite /usr/local/bin/idunn while the old daemon is supervising.
2. Create /etc/gamecult/idunn/bindings/ and the per-target brake stores.
3. Install deploy/idunn-yggdrasil.service from this repository. It invokes idunn serve and names every store explicitly.
4. Stop the old unit, move the binary into place, daemon-reload, start.
5. Verify continuity actually actuates — kill a managed daemon and watch it come back — before trusting the cutover. A control plane that starts is not a control plane that supervises.

The window matters. Between step 4's stop and a verified step 5, nothing is supervising the swarm. Do it with the targets already migrated, so the new daemon has bindings to load and the window is short.

Retiring Codex

Decided by the operator 2026-09-05: the estate is not going back to Codex. Generic token capacity comes from elsewhere, and anything served to third parties needs an EU supplier with a DPA — together.ai is the current direction. That makes the Codex integration a maintenance liability with no consumer, and it is deep enough to be worth naming before anyone starts pulling.

Live state. codex-connector.service was active (running) and failing 401 token_expired on a three-minute loop against https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/models, with nothing connected to port 4103. Stopped and disabled 2026-09-05; the port is closed and the loop has ended. It had consumed 1min 30s of CPU and peaked at 1.2 GB doing nothing but retrying expired credentials.

Two loose ends that stop left behind:

• ghostlight-dungeon.service carries Environment=GHOSTLIGHT_MODEL_CONNECTOR=127.0.0.1:4103, which now points at nothing. It had logged nothing for 24 hours before the stop, so this broke no working path — but it is where the provider replacement lands first.
• epiphany-model-connector.service binds the same port with --model gpt-5.4 --codex-home .... It is inactive and disabled. Two Codex connectors were competing for one endpoint, which is duplicate authority of exactly the kind the census was looking for; both are now off, and only one of them has a repository.

Blast radius, in the order it should come out:

Surface	What it is
codex-connector.service on yggdrasil	running, 401-looping, no consumers
the sudoers deploy/restart codex-connector grants	privileged half — remove before the script
GameCult/CodexConnector	the whole repo; a transport for a provider we no longer buy
Epiphany/epiphany-openai-codex-spine	an OpenAI/Codex adapter crate
Epiphany/epiphany-codex-bridge + vendored app-server	Codex JSON-RPC protocol edge
VoidBot config	turnCodexModel, mindCodexModel, imaginationCodexModel, codexModelReasoningEffort and their model lists
~/.codex/AGENTS.md and per-repo AGENTS.md	doctrine maintained for a second agent runtime

Do not simply delete the Epiphany and Ghostlight side. Those are minds that need an inference transport; CodexConnector was one implementation of that seam, and the seam is worth keeping. The correct shape is to replace the provider behind it, not to remove the boundary and let each mind grow its own HTTP client — that would be re-forking the wire law CodexConnector's README exists to prevent. Retire the Codex-specific backend; decide deliberately whether the transport daemon is rebuilt against the new supplier or whether CultNet already covers it.

Sequencing note: epiphany and epiphany-capstone-17 are on this migration list. Do not write bindings for them until the provider question is settled — their deployment shape depends on whether they still front a transport daemon.

What is not carried forward

Odin@ed48185 ("Supervise Bifrost Persona feedback deployment", 2026-07-18) added a hardcoded bifrost-persona-feedback target with a stale-deployment failure contract and restart_on_missing_publication. It never reached this repository — it landed on Odin main after the extraction branch diverged, and 330e4cd deleted the machinery it was written against.

It is preserved at the pre-idunn-extraction-main tag in Odin. When bifrost-persona-feedback is migrated, that commit is the specification for what its health contract must express — re-expressed as a recipe [service.health] contract, not restored as Rust.