For a follower to forward requests to a leader the leader must be known.
But there may be a situation where a follower does not learn about
a leader for a while. This may happen when a node becomes a follower while its
log is up-to-date and there are no new entries submitted to raft. In such
case the leader will send nothing to the follower and the only way to
learn about the current leader is to get a message from it. Until a new
entry is added to the raft's log a follower that does not know who the
leader is will not be able to add entries. Kind of a deadlock. Note that
the problem is specific to our implementation where failure detection is
done by an outside module. In vanilla raft a leader sends messages to
all followers periodically, so essentially it is never idle.
The patch solves this by broadcasting specially crafted append reject to all
nodes in the cluster on a tick in case a leader is not known. The leader
responds to this message with an empty append request which will cause the
node to learn about the leader. For optimisation purposes the patch
sends the broadcast only in case there is actually an operation that
waits for leader to be known.
Fixes#10379
7f26a8eef5