70a24060b5
The wire spec is silent on threading, but a clean-room client built single-threaded mostly works for opportunistic LXMF and starts breaking on Resource transfers and Link keepalives. This is the #1 cause of 'my client compiles and almost works but is flaky'. Five sub-sections: §13.1 Long-running threads — Transport.jobloop (every 250ms, runs all maintenance), count_traffic_loop (every 1s bandwidth snapshots), per-Link Link.__watchdog_job (RTT-driven keepalive emission and STALE→CLOSED transitions), per-Resource Resource.__watchdog_job (retransmit timeouts), announce-handler callbacks fire on FRESH daemon threads per inbound announce, per-interface RX thread, process_announce_queue chained one-shot timers. §13.2 Lock inventory — 18 named Transport / Identity / Link / Resource / Destination locks. jobs_lock is the most aggressive: held for the entire jobs() body so parallel job invocations can't pile up. §13.3 Callback-thread guarantees: packet/link/receipt callbacks all run synchronously on the receive thread; only announce-handler callbacks run on fresh threads. Critical design implications: - Don't block the receive thread (queue-and-return). - Announce handlers race; lock shared state. - link_closed can fire from two paths (watchdog OR peer LINKCLOSE); make idempotent. §13.4 Implementation-private timing constants — job_interval = 250ms, links_check_interval = 1s, tables_cull_interval = 5s, hashlist_maxsize = 1M, WATCHDOG_MAX_SLEEP, PROCESSING_GRACE, SENDER_GRACE_TIME, etc. Don't scale below 100ms job_interval. §13.5 Source map. Test vectors and Source map renumbered to §14 and §15. Other section numbers unchanged. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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Reticulum Specifications
Byte-level interoperability specifications for the Reticulum Network Stack and LXMF — the parts that aren't in the upstream manuals but are needed to build a working client from scratch.
Upstream Reticulum has excellent operator-facing documentation (config, deployment, design philosophy). What's missing — and what every alternative implementation has had to reverse-engineer from the Python source — is an authoritative wire-level spec: header bit layouts, msgpack field types, signature input formats, the exact behavior of Transport.outbound, and the long list of "would never guess from reading the manual" gotchas that cost hours of debugging each.
This repo collects those findings in one place. The hope is that future client authors (Kotlin, Swift, Rust, Go, embedded C — pick your stack) can read this instead of re-deriving everything from RNS/Transport.py.
Status
Early days, contributions welcome. Current content was bootstrapped from the working notes of two reverse-engineering efforts:
- The web-based Reticulum client at
reticulum-lora-webclient - The native Android client at
reticulum-mobile-app
Each finding is grounded in upstream source citations (file + line) so it can be re-verified as RNS evolves.
What's here
SPEC.md— the single combined spec document, organized by protocol layerflows/— chronological end-to-end narratives (e.g. "send a message"), cross-referencing SPEC.md sectionstools/— self-contained Python verifier scripts that test SPEC.md claims against upstream RNS / LXMFtest-vectors/— known-good byte sequences each implementation should be able to round-trip (intent: grow into a compliance suite)
As content grows, SPEC.md will be split into per-layer files (packet header, identity, announce, token-crypto, LXMF, link, resource, transport).
Scope
In scope:
- Wire formats: byte layouts, field encodings, framing
- Signing inputs and what's hashed where
- Cross-cutting behaviors required for interop (path requests, ratchet rotation, retransmit semantics)
- "Gotchas" — things upstream code does that aren't obvious from the manual or RFC-style sketches
- Test vectors that any implementation must be able to round-trip
Out of scope:
- Operator/user documentation — see the official manual
- API design choices for any specific implementation
- Networking layer config (interfaces, transport modes) — already well documented
Source citations
Where a finding cites upstream Python code, the path is relative to a standard pip install rns lxmf installation, e.g. RNS/Transport.py, LXMF/LXMF.py. Where the bundled umsgpack is referenced, the path is RNS/vendor/umsgpack.py.
When upstream code changes such that a citation no longer matches, file an issue or PR — the goal is to track the de-facto wire spec as it actually behaves, not as it was at any single snapshot.
Contributing
If you've debugged a Reticulum interop problem and the answer wasn't in the upstream docs, please add it. Format:
### N.M Short description of the finding
**Symptom:** what you observed that prompted the investigation.
**What's happening:** the actual mechanism, ideally with upstream source citation (file + line).
**Implication / fix:** what an implementation must do to interop.
**Source:** upstream file paths and approximate line numbers.
Add a worked test vector to test-vectors/ if the finding is byte-level.
License
CC BY 4.0 — use freely, attribution appreciated.