fix(operator): leave kubelet admission rejections out of a package stage's Restarts by ayuskauskas · Pull Request #787 · NVIDIA/nodewright

ayuskauskas · 2026-10-08T16:16:19Z

Closes #731.

Summary

A package stage's Job counts pods the kubelet rejected at admission in status.failed. Since #707, Restarts was written straight from that number, so a package that never ran could show several failed attempts in the CLI and in nodewright_package_restarts_count. This change leaves those pods out.

What changed

podRejectedAtAdmission (pod_controller.go, next to podFailedGenuinely) matches a pod that:
- is Failed;
- has no container or init-container statuses;
- has no DisruptionTarget;
- is not podFailedGenuinely.
packageJobRestarts (job_controller.go) returns status.failed minus the Job's child pods that match the predicate, never below 0. A pod still listed in status.uncountedTerminatedPods.failed is not subtracted. All three Job-side writes for package Jobs use it: recordJobRestarts, recordJobErroring and recordJobCompletion.
If the pod list fails, the helper logs and falls back to status.failed. The count only feeds the CLI and the metric, so it never blocks the completion or erroring transition.
Docs (metrics.md, the metric's HELP string, the dashboard's Failed Attempts description) now say package stages leave out admission rejections, and say when that holds. Interrupt-stage wording is unchanged.

Not in this PR

The issue's first suggestion (limit the not-genuine path's write to entries already at erroring) is already on main: fix(operator): mark a node erroring only when a stage fails #692 removed that write, and an entry already erroring at the Job's stage takes the genuine path.
Interrupt stages are unchanged. recordJobCompletion still records an interrupt Job's raw status.failed, so a rejected interrupt pod is still counted there.
The retry budget is unchanged. Admission rejections still count toward the Job's backoffLimit.
Sibling follow-ups from fix(operator): count failed attempts while a package's Job retries #707: Make recordJobRestarts best-effort so a failed count write does not block log snapshots or Job marking #730 (make recordJobRestarts best-effort), Update the package-execution-as-jobs design doc for Job-owned restart counting #732 (the package-execution-as-jobs design doc, which still describes the old count) and Record Restarts for a Job's first failure that lands before the heavy pass saves in_progress #733.

Known limitations

The pod cache and the Job cache can disagree briefly. A rejected pod can be Failed in the pod cache before the Job controller has counted it, either in status.failed or in uncountedTerminatedPods. It is then subtracted early, and the in-flight count reads low until the next Job status write. A pre-implementation review suggested closing this by also treating a pod that still carries the job-tracking finalizer as uncounted; that is not done here.
A rejected pod can count again before the stage finishes. If terminated-pod GC removes it while the stage's Job is still running, the next count includes it. Once a stage's outcome is recorded, its count is final.
One signal goes away. A stage burned only by admission rejections (OutOfpods, UnexpectedAdmissionError) now shows 0 restarts, so an alert on nodewright_package_restarts_count > 0 no longer fires for that case.

Testing

make vet lint unit-tests from operator/ passes: lint reports 0 issues, and every suite passes, including the controller suite at 570 of 570 specs.
New and changed specs cover:
- an active Job with only rejected pods, which writes nothing;
- mixed genuine and rejected pods (3 failed: 1 genuine and 2 rejected record 1);
- the clamp at 0;
- disrupted, ContainerStatusUnknown, DeadlineExceeded and still-uncounted rejected pods, which are not subtracted;
- genuine BackoffLimitExceeded and Complete Jobs with rejected pods;
- the pod-list failure fallback for a completion and a timeout, using an interceptor that fails pod Lists.
Not run: the chainsaw and e2e suites.

AI assistance

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A human approved the plan, ruled on each gate finding, and accepted the result.

…starts A package stage's Restarts came straight from its Job's status.failed, which also counts the pods the kubelet rejected at admission before the package ran. A node refusing replacements on its way back from a reboot then showed four failed attempts, in the CLI and in nodewright_package_restarts_count, for a package that never executed. Every Job-side Restarts write for a package stage (recordJobRestarts, recordJobErroring, recordJobCompletion) now goes through one helper, packageJobRestarts: status.failed less the Job's child pods rejected at admission, never below 0. A rejected pod is one podRejectedAtAdmission accepts (Failed, no container statuses, no DisruptionTarget, not podFailedGenuinely), and it is subtracted only once the Job has counted it, that is when status.uncountedTerminatedPods.failed no longer lists it. Disruption casualties, ContainerStatusUnknown pods and pods killed by their own deadline are still counted. The rejections still spend the Job's retry budget. The pods are read from another cache than the Job, so an in-flight count can be briefly off. Every Job status write reruns it, and a terminal Job has no uncounted pods. If the pod list fails, the write falls back to status.failed so a display count never holds up the state transition it rides on. Interrupt Jobs keep their current values. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

…on rejections A package stage's Restarts no longer counts the pods the kubelet rejected at admission, but the metric reference in metrics.md, the nodewright_package_restarts_count HELP string and the Current Package Status panel description still said it counted every failed pod of the stage's Job. All three now say a package stage counts its Job's failed pods except those the kubelet rejected at admission. metrics.md adds that those pods never ran the package but still spend the stage's retry budget, so a stage can run out of retries with fewer failed attempts than its budget. The interrupt-stage wording is unchanged. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

…-restarts Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

…ion-rejections Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

packageJobRestarts falls back to status.failed when the Job's child pods cannot be listed, so the count never holds up the state write it rides on. Nothing tested that. A new table fails the pod List through an interceptor and checks that both the completion and the erroring writes still land, with Restarts equal to status.failed even though the Job's retained pods are admission rejections a working list would subtract. The metrics doc, the HELP string and the dashboard description said a package stage's count leaves out admission rejections without condition. It does so only while the rejected pods are still retained: once terminated-pod GC removes them they count again. All three now say so. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

github-actions · 2026-10-08T16:17:12Z

🌿 Preview your docs: https://nvidia-preview-fix-731-admission-rejections-restarts.docs.buildwithfern.com/nodewright

coderabbitai · 2026-10-08T16:20:38Z

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operator/internal/controller/job_controller.go
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📝 Walkthrough

Package Job restart counts now subtract eligible kubelet admission rejections from status.failed. Rejections still listed as uncounted by the Job controller are not subtracted. If child pods cannot be listed, the count falls back to status.failed. Package completion, erroring, and in-flight state updates use the adjusted count. Interrupt counting is unchanged. Tests and metric descriptions cover these rules.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Change: Bug fix · Severity of issue fixed: Low

Merge Risk: 🔵 Low · up to 2420c

In-flight restart counts can be temporarily inaccurate while the pod cache catches up. This is a bounded, acknowledged trade-off; the change is mergeable with owner awareness.

Pre-merge checks: 4

Passed checks: 4 passed

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description check		The description clearly explains the package-stage restart-count change, its scope, testing, and known limitations.
Title check		The title clearly and concisely identifies the main change: excluding kubelet admission rejections from package-stage restart counts.
Linked Issues check		For `#731`, package Job restart counts use `packageJobRestarts`. The helper subtracts eligible admission-rejected child pods from `status.failed`, excludes pods in `status.uncountedTerminatedPods.failed…
Out of Scope Changes check		The changes stay within `#731`. Controller changes implement package-stage restart filtering. Tests support the new behavior. Metric help text, metrics documentation, and the dashboard description docum…

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Inline comments:
Review comments at @operator/internal/controller/job_controller.go:
- Line 779: Update the terminal Job handling around r.childPods so terminal
writes use an uncached Pod list when determining the count passed to
packageJobRestarts. If that list fails, retain the status.failed fallback; do
not rely on the Job’s uncounted list to establish Pod cache freshness.

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docs/observability/dashboards/skyhook-dashboard.json
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operator/internal/controller/job_controller.go
operator/internal/controller/job_controller_test.go
operator/internal/controller/metrics.go
operator/internal/controller/pod_controller.go
operator/internal/controller/swap_test.go

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Inline comments:
Review comments at @operator/internal/controller/job_controller.go:
- Line 758: Update the packageJobRestarts call passed to skyhookNode.Upsert to
use r.liveChildPods instead of the cached r.childPods, so restart counts reflect
current child Pod state.

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…unning Terminated-pod GC can remove a retained admission-rejected pod, and the next count then includes it again. That only happens while the stage's Job is still running: once the stage's outcome is recorded, Restarts is final and never recomputed. Say so in metrics.md, the restarts metric HELP, the dashboard description and the packageJobRestarts comment. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

recordJobCompletion subtracts admission rejections only for package stages; an interrupt Job records its raw status.failed. Every interrupt completion spec ran with no child pods, so packageJobRestarts returned status.failed either way and dropping or inverting the guard still passed. A new spec completes an interrupt Job with status.failed = 2 and two rejected child pods and expects Restarts to stay 2. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

The Job and its pods come from separate informer caches. A terminal write could run before the pod cache showed the last attempt as an admission rejection, and the processed-Job marker then stops any recount, so the rejection stayed counted. The completion and erroring writes now list the Job's child pods through the uncached reader. A Job with no failures has nothing to subtract and skips the list, so only terminal Jobs that failed at least once pay for it. The in-flight write keeps reading the cache, since every Job status write reruns it, and a failed list still falls back to status.failed. Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

github-actions · 2026-10-14T17:04:38Z

@ayuskauskas this PR now has merge conflicts with main. Please rebase to resolve them.

…ections-restarts Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

ayuskauskas added 6 commits October 7, 2026 16:08

merge org/2026-09-30-nodewright-731-exclude-admission-rejections-from…

c684270

…-restarts Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

merge org/2026-09-30-nodewright-731-document-restarts-excludes-admiss…

e0d2807

…ion-rejections Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

merge org/2026-09-30-nodewright-731-repair-1

ed6aeb4

Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

ayuskauskas requested a review from a team October 8, 2026 16:16

ayuskauskas requested review from lockwobr and rice-riley as code owners October 8, 2026 16:16

github-actions Bot assigned ayuskauskas Oct 8, 2026

github-actions Bot added doc Documentation change (PR path label; doc issues use the Documentation type) component/operator Skyhook operator (controller-manager) labels Oct 8, 2026

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ayuskauskas added 3 commits October 13, 2026 13:38

ayuskauskas force-pushed the fix/731-admission-rejections-restarts branch from 1d6e149 to 6efbf16 Compare October 13, 2026 20:39

github-actions Bot added the needs-rebase label Oct 14, 2026

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into fix/731-admission-rej…

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…ections-restarts Signed-off-by: Alex Yuskauskas <ayuskauskas@nvidia.com>

lockwobr approved these changes Oct 14, 2026

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lockwobr merged commit 0d50f45 into main Oct 14, 2026
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lockwobr deleted the fix/731-admission-rejections-restarts branch October 14, 2026 23:19

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fix(operator): leave kubelet admission rejections out of a package stage's Restarts - #787

fix(operator): leave kubelet admission rejections out of a package stage's Restarts#787
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ayuskauskas commented Oct 8, 2026

Summary

What changed

Not in this PR

Known limitations

Testing

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