Blockchain Release: Feature Updates & Bug Fixes

The team has a new release tagged 2021.04.26.1 which contains some new features and bug fixes. This is a required upgrade for all miners and will be automatic for all Hotspots using the Helium firmware when we GA. Specifically, this release includes support for Payment Memos which requires a chain variable to activate and makes this a required release. We don't intend to activate this chain variable for about a week. Please read further for more details.

miner#742: Update only snapshot to 819361

The team has updated only the snapshot block to 819361 for faster sync to the current blockchain head block.

miner#737: Update dependencies and snapshot to 813601

The team updated miner dependencies and the snapshot block to 813601 to allow newly onboarded hotspots to sync faster to the current blockchain head block.

miner#655: Update rebar to v3.14

As part of regular maintenance the team has updated the rebar version to 3.14 included in miner repo.

blockchain-core#785: Better stacktrace for gossip handler crash

A minor change to allow better error messages when libp2p gossip handler crashes in blockchain-core.

blockchain-core#782: Fix for syncing blockchain-etl

Some members of the community reported that they had issues syncing blockchain-etl. The team found the root cause to be an unnecessrary call to lookup the entire chain for previous blockchain_txn_poc_request, this has been fixed to only start searching from the current ledger height.

blockchain-core#768: Allow memo support for payment transactions

The team has enabled memo support for payment-v2 transactions. Note that the implementation is a bit different than proposed in HIP-26 in the sense that the only memos the blockchain supports will be 64 bit unsigned integers.

blockchain-core#750: Sync performance improvements

The team updated the blockchain_sync_handler to try adding blocks in a spawned process so that blocks will continue to be added if a connection drops during sync. This may improve sync times.

blockchain-core#743: Update rebar for blockchain

As part of regular maintenance the team has updated the rebar version to 3.14 included in blockchain-core repo.

blockchain-core#733: Add aux-ledger support

The team added support for an auxiliary ledger to enable better testing of potential future chain variables and new blockchain features. The aux ledger maintains a copy of the actual on-chain ledger while allowing the team to test additional chain related changes.

erlang-libp2p#335: Manage the stungun timer better

This update adds a stungun timer reference to libp2p_transport_tcp module state and appropriately handles it.

erlang-libp2p#334: Fix fdset race condition

This change fixes a race condition the team noticed in libp2p_transport_tcp module.

erlang-libp2p#333: Garbage collect unused processes

This change adds a process id garbage collection monitor to better handle stale processes in the libp2p_swarm_server.

Plan

We have been beta testing 2021.04.26.1 since April 26th, 2021 12:30 PM PT. Current ETA for GA is 4:00 PM PT, April 26th, 2021. We've been beta testing a prior version 2021.04.22.1 over the weekend and updated just the snapshot today in order to improve initial sync times for new miners.