Currently there is no bound on the length of a user message submitted in
the TUI or through the app server interface. That means users can paste
many megabytes of text, which can lead to bad performance, hangs, and
crashes. In extreme cases, it can lead to a [kernel
panic](https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/12323).
This PR limits the length of a user input to 2**20 (about 1M)
characters. This value was chosen because it fills the entire context
window on the latest models, so accepting longer inputs wouldn't make
sense anyway.
Summary
- add a shared `MAX_USER_INPUT_TEXT_CHARS` constant in codex-protocol
and surface it in TUI and app server code
- block oversized submissions in the TUI submit flow and emit error
history cells when validation fails
- reject heavy app-server requests with JSON-RPC `-32602` and structured
`input_too_large` data, plus document the behavior
Testing
- ran the IDE extension with this change and verified that when I
attempt to paste a user message that's several MB long, it correctly
reports an error instead of crashing or making my computer hot.
Reapply "Add app-server transport layer with websocket support" with
additional fixes from https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/11313/changes
to avoid deadlocking.
This reverts commit 47356ff83c.
## Summary
To avoid deadlocking when queues are full, we maintain separate tokio
tasks dedicated to incoming vs outgoing event handling
- split the app-server main loop into two tasks in
`run_main_with_transport`
- inbound handling (`transport_event_rx`)
- outbound handling (`outgoing_rx` + `thread_created_rx`)
- separate incoming and outgoing websocket tasks
## Validation
Integration tests, testing thoroughly e2e in codex app w/ >10 concurrent
requests
<img width="1365" height="979" alt="Screenshot 2026-02-10 at 2 54 22 PM"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/47ca2c13-f322-4e5c-bedd-25859cbdc45f"
/>
---------
Co-authored-by: jif-oai <jif@openai.com>
This is a very large PR with some non-backwards-compatible changes.
Historically, `codex mcp` (or `codex mcp serve`) started a JSON-RPC-ish
server that had two overlapping responsibilities:
- Running an MCP server, providing some basic tool calls.
- Running the app server used to power experiences such as the VS Code
extension.
This PR aims to separate these into distinct concepts:
- `codex mcp-server` for the MCP server
- `codex app-server` for the "application server"
Note `codex mcp` still exists because it already has its own subcommands
for MCP management (`list`, `add`, etc.)
The MCP logic continues to live in `codex-rs/mcp-server` whereas the
refactored app server logic is in the new `codex-rs/app-server` folder.
Note that most of the existing integration tests in
`codex-rs/mcp-server/tests/suite` were actually for the app server, so
all the tests have been moved with the exception of
`codex-rs/mcp-server/tests/suite/mod.rs`.
Because this is already a large diff, I tried not to change more than I
had to, so `codex-rs/app-server/tests/common/mcp_process.rs` still uses
the name `McpProcess` for now, but I will do some mechanical renamings
to things like `AppServer` in subsequent PRs.
While `mcp-server` and `app-server` share some overlapping functionality
(like reading streams of JSONL and dispatching based on message types)
and some differences (completely different message types), I ended up
doing a bit of copypasta between the two crates, as both have somewhat
similar `message_processor.rs` and `outgoing_message.rs` files for now,
though I expect them to diverge more in the near future.
One material change is that of the initialize handshake for `codex
app-server`, as we no longer use the MCP types for that handshake.
Instead, we update `codex-rs/protocol/src/mcp_protocol.rs` to add an
`Initialize` variant to `ClientRequest`, which takes the `ClientInfo`
object we need to update the `USER_AGENT_SUFFIX` in
`codex-rs/app-server/src/message_processor.rs`.
One other material change is in
`codex-rs/app-server/src/codex_message_processor.rs` where I eliminated
a use of the `send_event_as_notification()` method I am generally trying
to deprecate (because it blindly maps an `EventMsg` into a
`JSONNotification`) in favor of `send_server_notification()`, which
takes a `ServerNotification`, as that is intended to be a custom enum of
all notification types supported by the app server. So to make this
update, I had to introduce a new variant of `ServerNotification`,
`SessionConfigured`, which is a non-backwards compatible change with the
old `codex mcp`, and clients will have to be updated after the next
release that contains this PR. Note that
`codex-rs/app-server/tests/suite/list_resume.rs` also had to be update
to reflect this change.
I introduced `codex-rs/utils/json-to-toml/src/lib.rs` as a small utility
crate to avoid some of the copying between `mcp-server` and
`app-server`.
Eric Traut ·
Max Johnson ·
Michael Bolin ·