Blockchain Maintenance Release

Update: The current release candidate primed for GA is 2020.10.23.0 which fixes minor state channel server side issues. We will keep this post updated with more details.

Note: The 2020.10.21.0 has been held prior to GA while we continue to work through small issues that were found during beta testing. We will update this post with more details.

The 2020.10.19.0 2020.10.20.0 2020.10.21.0 2020.10.23.0 release is a blockchain maintenance release. Notably the team has fixed an issue where miners running in Docker were getting stuck during elections, finalized support for multisig, and improved client side packet transfer performance for state channels.

Highlights and Related PRs

• Handle unsupported regions for miner lora module. miner#540
• Added asynchronous election completion. miner#537
• Fixed divide by zero error for calculating next block time. miner#536
• Use bloom filter to improve packet times. blockchain-core#602
• Fixed bad match error on state channel garbage collection. blockchain-core#651
• Filter downed packet streams on client side state channels. blockchain-core#654
• Added timeouts for outbound packet dials. blockchain-core#653
• Refactored voting counts for multisig. blockchain-core#650
• Added safe defaults to reward_version for state channel garbage collection. blockchain-core#647
• Fixed lost state when enqueuing packets on client side state channels. blockchain-core#647
• Added ability to fetch snapshot from the network. blockchain-core#648

Blessed Snapshot Update

Finally, this release bumps the blessed snapshot to height 549361 which will improve sync times of newly onboarded Hotspots.

Release Update: New tag 2020.10.20.0 October 20th, 2020

As a result of beta testing overnight, the team identified a few more regression induced bugs. We have addressed those bugs and have updated the tag from 2020.10.19.0 to 2020.10.20.0.

Below is a short summary of the bug fixes and their related PRs

• Switch downstream erbloom depenency with an updated rebar.config file. blockchain-core#657
• Add miner side support for invalid transaction log messages. miner#432
• Update libp2p for downstream relcast bug fixes. libp2p#301

Release Update: New tag 2020.10.21.0 October 21st, 2020

The team has added support for LoRaWAN rx2 window and squashed a few more bugs in the new release tagged 2020.10.21.0. Below is a list of related PRs:

• Add support for rx2 window. blockchain-core#656
• Fix state channel test suite. blockchain-core#652
• Fix txn validation printing. blockchain-core#660
• Add miner side support for rx2 window. miner#542
• Fix state channel tests for miner. miner#543

Release Update: New tag 2020.10.23.0 October 23rd, 2020

The team noticed additional issues with state channel server side handling while beta testing the previous release candidate, we have fixed those in 2020.10.23.0 release candidate. Additionally we have updated the blessed snapshot block to 555121 and updated the Dockerfile for ARM images. Related PRs:

• Don't close state channel on overspend. blockchain-core#664
• Reapply nonce fix for correct state keeping sc server side. blockchain-core#663
• Update blockchain-core and snapshot block. miner-548
• Add rust and cargo for ARM docker image. miner-546

Plan

As you can note in our release updates, the team continues to iterate on a stable release version we were comfortable sending to GA. We are finding important issues through beta testing. Ultimately we decided to scrap three release candidates but we have documented the plan below for posterity.

We will likely work towards finding a solution and initiate testing tomorrow and over the weekend.

• We have begun beta-testing 2020.10.19.0 around 2:30 PM PST on 19th October, 2020 and plan to release it to GA by 3 PM PST, 20th October, 2020.
• We will begin beta-testing 2020.10.20.0 around 2:30 PM PST, October 20th, 2020 and keep the community apprised of any further changes.
• We have begun beta-testing 2020.10.21.0 around 2:30 PM PST, October 21st, 2020 and plan to GA by October 22nd, 2020 around 3PM PST.
• We have begun beta-testing 2020.10.23.0 around 2:30 PM PST, October 23rd, 2020 and plan to GA on Monday, October 26th, 2020 around 11AM PST.