Spring v1.0.2

This release focuses on enhancing stability and performance, with improved block synchronization, logging, and system compatibility.

Notable Changes

• Support for Linux Kernel 4.15: Added compatibility for systems running Linux Kernel 4.15 by falling back to random_access_file, ensuring broader platform support. (#780)
• P2P synchronization enhancements: P2P connections continue during snapshot operations, improved reconnection handling, prevented syncing ahead in irreversible mode, and continue syncing when last irreversible block (LIB) is paused. (#768, #838, #811, #777)
• State History ABI updates: Added block header extension types to the state history ABI, enhancing developers' ability to work with extended block data. (#783)
• Improved logging accuracy: Enhanced the reporting of produced and received block times, disambiguated time entries in logs, and updated handshake logs to debug level to reduce verbosity. (#850, #837, #839)
• Fixed hangs on shutdown and exit: Resolved issues that caused the node to hang during shutdown processes, ensuring smoother and more reliable operations. (#845, #816)

Complete Change Log

SHiP

• Fix hang on exit, draining references to SHiP found in io_service.
• Fix hang on shutdown.
• Add block header extensions types to state history ABI.

P2P

• Normally wait for connection monitor to reconnect.
• Prevent sync ahead in irreversible mode.
• P2P: Allow irreversible mode syncing to continue when LIB is paused.
• Continue P2P connections while performing a snapshot.

Logging

• Fix reported time for produced blocks and disambiguate time in logs.
• Improve reported time for receiving and applying blocks.
• Update Produced block and Received block logs to report lib as the last irreversible block according to the reported received or produced block instead of the fork database root.
• Change handshake logs to debug instead of info.

System Compatibility

• Support Linux Kernel 4.15, by falling back to random_access_file for the older kernel.

System Stability

• Take into account that a claimed block may already be irreversible in consider_voting.

Tests

• Enhance test framework and test cases to sync and replay using actual committed reference blockchain data.
• Addition test coverage to validate version support for finalizer safety file.
• New test case where finality advances on lesser LIB.
• Split up long running tests so CICD can finish faster.
• Enable debug logging of the vote logger to support unittest.
• P2P: Increase timeout of sync throttle test.

Contributors

Special thanks to the contributors that submitted patches for this release:

• @linh2931
• @greg7mdp
• @heifner
• @spoonincode

Spring v1.0.1

This release introduces the V8 Snapshot format, which contains data missing from the V7 Snapshot format that may be needed to ensure continued syncing in some edge cases. Other changes include improvements to block production, replay, peer syncing, and deep-mind logging.

Note

Spring v1.0.1 cannot be loaded from V7 snapshots (created by Spring v1.0.0). It can load snapshot versions V6 and prior, as well as the new V8 snapshots. To upgrade a 1.0.0 node restarting from a compatible snapshot is required.

Notable Changes

• Introduced V8 Snapshots to fix potential loss of ability to sync in some edge cases due to missing data in V7 Snapshots
• Fixed bug in which block production could briefly pause after prior block producer missed their round
• Replay with --force-all-checks now validates quorum certificates (QCs) in the block extension
• P2P improvements to prevent unnecessary timeouts and redundant block requests
• Improved deep-mind logging

Complete Change Log

Bug Fixes

• Ensure header extension cache of blocks data loaded from data files is always available
• Validate block extensions during replay
• Introduce V8 Snapshot format
• Fix erroneous block production pause when prior block producer misses round

P2P Improvements

• Avoid redundant block requests
• Avoid timing out connection due to main thread being busy applying blocks

Deep-mind

• Use block's perspective of LIB instead of node's perspective of LIB in deep-mind logs
• Flush deep-mind logger after each message

Tests

• Test cases to validate edge cases related to missing V7 Snapshot data
• Rewrite P2P sync throttle test
• Improve test stability by preparing blocks for tests appropriately
• Add better test coverage of replay with --force-all-checks
• Correct reference fsi file used in tests
• Tests to verify expected behavior of replay of blocks with bad QC data

Other

• Verify block signature as soon as possible prior to any further block validation
• Consistent exception type on block extension validation
• Add earlier and more specific (yet backwards compatible) checks when applying policy diffs
• Cleanup error messages when upgrading from Spring v1.0.0
• Logging improvements for received blocks
• Utilize compiler to ensure blocks are treated as immutable after construction within implementation

Full Changelog: v1.0.0...v1.0.1

Contributors

Special thanks to the contributors that submitted patches for this release:

• @linh2931
• @heifner
• @greg7mdp

Spring v1.0.0

Antelope Spring is the successor to Leap as the C++ implementation of node software for blockchain networks based on the Antelope Protocol.

Spring 1.0.0 introduces Savanna consensus, which reduces time to finality from 3 minutes to 1 second under typical network conditions.

Also featured in Spring 1.0.0 is a significant reworking of the State History Plugin to improve performance, reliability, and support cross block chain consensus leveraging the faster finality of Savanna.

Note

To maintain IBC compatibility with EOS after it transitions to Savanna consensus, other Antelope chains will need to upgrade to a Savanna compatible IBC contract which depends on the activation of the BLS protocol feature that was first introduced in Leap v5.0.0.

Important Links

• Instructions to upgrade a node to Spring 1.0.0
• Instructions to transition a network to Savanna Consensus
• Recommendations for managing finalizer keys

New License Terms

Antelope Spring is made available under the terms of a Business Source License which is automatically granted for all usages which are Directly in Service of or Materially Dependent on the EOS Blockchain Network. Full details of the license terms may be found in the LICENSE file. Parties seeking a License for other usages may inquire by contacting [email protected].

Release Notes

Notable Changes

A subset of the changes in this release may require node operators and downstream service providers to make configuration changes. At a glance, these include:

• Introduced Savanna consensus
• Changes to some HTTP response codes
• Introduced new Snapshot format
• Disabled State Log History compression
• Introduced new State History configuration options
• Introduced new Finalizer configuration options
• Introduced new vote-threads option
• Introduced new max-reversible-blocks option

For actionable details and recommendations concerning the above changes, please see the Spring 1.0.0 upgrade guide. For complete technical details, consult the Complete Change Log and related pull requests below.

Important

The following features have been deprecated in Spring v1.0.0 and will be removed in Spring v2.0.0:

• The Prometheus plugin
• count field in get_table_by_scope response

Please see the Deprecation Log for more information.

Complete Change Log

Introduced in Spring v1.0.0

Savanna consensus

• Adds new chain_plugin option max-reversible-blocks. Specifies the maximum number of reversible blocks beyond current LIB to allow before the node is gracefully shutdown.
• New chain api get_finalizer_info with information on finalizers and last votes.
• Endpoint get_block_header_state updated for compatibility, and functionality reduced..
• Allow a larger number of proposer (producers) in Savanna from 125 to 64K. This matches the maximum number of allowed finalizers.
• Versioning for Finalizer Safety Information file.
• cleos support for get_finalizer_info.
• Create Savanna unittests modeled after the fast testnet wave tests
• Only vote on recent blocks and simply voting by comparing time.
• Switch to timestamp for better detection of most recent policy change.
• Use lastest_qc_claim block_num in block header.
• Add last_pending_finalizer_policy_generation into the finality digest calculation.
• Update logic to use latest timestamp to pick winning fork, previously used block height.
• Update finality digest adding level 3 commitments.
• Update logic to use latest timestamp to pick winning fork, previously used block height.
• Add timestamp and parent_timestamp to finality leaf nodes.
• Require a QC (quorum certificate) on both finalizer policy sets (active and pending) before considering a QC to have reached quorum on a block with a pending finalizer policy change.
• Switch to 2-chain for finality.
• For the convenience of finality violation proofs, make the finality digest to commit to the root digest of a Merkle tree over a sequence of records extracted from the sequence of block_refs in the block_refs. This Merkle root digest is called reversible_blocks_root.
• Revert previous changes to liveness rule. After evaluation the previous changes reduced liveness, and engineering identified a better solution.
• Write out chain_head after vote_processor threads have stopped.
• When a new finalizer policy or proposer policy is proposed in a block, the deep-mind logs should contain an entry associated with the block that contains the full policy (not just the diff). The keys within these policies should have string encoding.
• Move tracking of Savanna pending LIB into fork database. The fork database is in charge of tracking and persisting cached current pending Savanna LIB.
• Refactor ForkDB to consolidate concept of HEAD and better track the pending irreversible block.
• Validate QC by bitsize of votes.
• Clear out the state history log when Savanna transition is forked out.
• Improve accuracy of state history by selectively including finalizer policy.
• Update application of finalizer policies to avoid edge cases.
• When syncing/replaying optimize voting-start by processing on main thread.
• Extend scenarios where a deleted safety data file may be recovered.
• Avoid spamming peers with unnecessary votes when nodeos is first syncing old blocks.
• Align SHiP abi's by adding finality_data.
• Shift to new fork database only after irreversible transition is completed. Previously switch may occur before transition completed.
• Fix sporadic issues, update ForkDB to return block matching block number.
• Add strong QC block number to minimize size of proofs, and aid in finality violation proofs.
• Update controller to proper set producer authority under Savanna.
• Improve stability in P2P syncing for large forks with very small sync spans.
• Update to use the last pending finalizer policy in the history of the blockchain, if there are no pending finalizer policies in the queue, then the last pending finalizer policy is the active finalizer policy.
• Resolves duplicate polices from advancing. Finality can advance multiple blocks, previously this may cause duplicate policies to advance.
• Extend finality data to include full policy (including generation number) of the finalizer policy proposed in the associated block. This is used in SHiP data stream.
• Improve set_proposed_finalizers, has no side effects if transaction fails.
• Use the correct finalizer policy when logging.
• Avoid adding new proposer policy if there is no change.
• Improve set_finalizers host function to take a packed finalizer format.
• Move create and send vote off the main thread.
• Improved algorithm governing generation of finalizer policy.
• Avoid using fork in log messages that are not related to micro-forks.
• Check and test to ensure proposer policy is only set when there is a change.
• Update representation of variant formate for fc
• [Improve snapshot scheduling to avoid race conditions, and fixes issues where no snapshot was take...

Spring v1.0.0-rc3

Antelope Spring is the successor to Leap as the C++ implementation of node software for blockchain networks based on the Antelope Protocol.

Spring v1.0.0 introduces Savanna consensus, which reduces time to finality from 3 minutes to 1 second under typical network conditions.

Also featured in Spring 1.0.0 is a significant reworking of the State History Plugin to improve performance, reliability, and support cross block chain consensus leveraging the faster finality of Savanna.

Note

To maintain IBC compatibility with EOS after it transitions to Savanna consensus, other Antelope chains will need to upgrade to a Savanna compatible IBC contract which depends on the activation of the BLS protocol feature that was first introduced in Leap v5.0.0.

Important Links

• Instructions to upgrade a node to Spring 1.0.0
• Instructions to transition a network to Savanna Consensus
• Recommendations for managing finalizer keys

New License Terms

Antelope Spring is made available under the terms of a Business Source License which is automatically granted for all usages which are Directly in Service of or Materially Dependent on the EOS Blockchain Network. Full details of the license terms may be found in the LICENSE file. Parties seeking a License for other usages may inquire by contacting [email protected].

Release Notes

Notable Changes

Spring v1.0.0-rc3 fixes several defects reported against Spring v1.0.0-rc2. The most notable changes include:

• Improved liveness properties of consensus by modifying the rules that finalizers use to decide between voting strong vs weak
• Updated safety.dat format to include checksum to detect possible corruption on startup
• Modified behavior of max-reversible-blocks option to only pause production rather than shutdown
• Fixed regression in v1.0.0-rc2 that allowed the node to sync too far ahead
• Fixed crash when running SHiP during replay
• Additional improvements to logging and tests

Complete Change Log

Changes in Spring v1.0.0-rc3

Stability

• add BOOST_TEST_DEFAULTS_TO_CORE_DUMP to libtester users
• FSI serialization: support dynamically sized data and verify checksum
• Use other_branch_latest_time for liveness
• P2P: Prevent node from syncing too far ahead
• Pause production when max-reversible-blocks reached
• SHiP: Fix SHiP replay over savanna transition blocks
• Improve finalizer safety file exception handling

Tests

• Test verifying that proposer policy does not become active when finality has stalled
• Simplify disaster_recovery_2 test and verify correct LIB
• Test to demonstrate weak masking issue
• Improve restart production integration test
• Test validating new fsi design
• Fix liveness integration test flakiness
• Add integration tests for production-pause-vote-timeout

Maintainance

• various different signedness warning fixes
• bump chainbase submodule to main with signedness fix

Logging

• Additional debug output
• Logging improvements

Full Changelog: v1.0.0-rc2...v1.0.0-rc3

Contributors

Special thanks to the contributors that submitted patches for this release:

• @arhag
• @heifner
• @greg7mdp
• @spoonincode
• @linh2931

Spring v1.0.0-rc2

Antelope Spring is the successor to Leap as the C++ implementation of node software for blockchain networks based on the Antelope Protocol.

Spring v1.0.0 introduces Savanna consensus, which reduces time to finality from 3 minutes to 1 second under typical network conditions.

Also featured in Spring 1.0.0 is a significant reworking of the State History Plugin to improve performance, reliability, and support cross block chain consensus leveraging the faster finality of Savanna.

Note

To maintain IBC compatibility with EOS after it transitions to Savanna consensus, other Antelope chains will need to upgrade to a Savanna compatible IBC contract which depends on the activation of the BLS protocol feature that was first introduced in Leap v5.0.0.

Important Links

• Instructions to upgrade a node to Spring 1.0.0
• Instructions to transition a network to Savanna Consensus
• Recommendations for managing finalizer keys

New License Terms

Antelope Spring is made available under the terms of a Business Source License which is automatically granted for all usages which are Directly in Service of or Materially Dependent on the EOS Blockchain Network. Full details of the license terms may be found in the LICENSE file. Parties seeking a License for other usages may inquire by contacting [email protected].

Release Notes

Notable Changes

Spring v1.0.0-rc2 fixes several defects reported against Spring v1.0.0-rc1. The most notable changes include:

• The invalid snapshots generated in rc1 have been fixed in rc2.
• P2P changes were made fixing issues with frozen syncing observed in rc1

Important

The count field in the response to get_table_by_scope has been deprecated in this release and will be removed in Spring v2.0.0. See the Deprecation Log for more information.

Complete Change Log

Fixed in Spring v1.0.0-rc2

Snapshots

• v7 snapshot loading failures
• Loading from snapshot with block strides
• Check for chain_head.dat on snapshot load
• treat a end_block_num=0 as "forever" in snapshot scheduler for compatibility with leap 4.0

Syncing

• P2P: Sync not making progress after a timeout and reassign_fetch
• P2P: Sync mode stuck after hitting max-reversible-blocks, after restart
• P2P: Limit requested blocks to avoid max-reversible-blocks
• max-reversible-blocks syncing old blocks

Other

• log entry for legacy producer schedule broken in rc1
• Add changes required for updating to boost 1.86 - but without the boost upgrade
• Update chainbase to tip (initialization / move operations update)
• fix true_lowest() for uint128[2] index; possibly resolving some secondary table row RPC queries
• limit the vector size that can be reserved
• Remove unnecessary code that cannot be executed.
• Create Savanna unittests modeled after the fast testnet wave tests

Full Changelog: v1.0.0-rc1...v1.0.0-rc2

Contributors

Special thanks to the contributors that submitted patches for this release:

• @greg7mdp
• @heifner
• @spoonincode

Spring v1.0.0-rc1

Caution

This release (Spring v1.0.0-rc1) generates invalid snapshots and should not be used. Please use Spring v1.0.0-rc2.

Antelope Spring is the successor to Leap as the C++ implementation of node software for blockchain networks based on the Antelope Protocol.

Spring 1.0.0 introduces Savanna consensus, which reduces time to finality from 3 minutes to 1 second under typical network conditions.

Also featured in Spring 1.0.0 is a significant reworking of the State History Plugin to improve performance, reliability, and support cross block chain consensus leveraging the faster finality of Savanna.

Note

To maintain IBC compatibility with EOS after it transitions to Savanna consensus, other Antelope chains will need to upgrade to a Savanna compatible IBC contract which depends on the activation of the BLS protocol feature that was first introduced in Leap v5.0.0.

Important Links

• Instructions to upgrade a node to Spring 1.0.0
• Instructions to transition a network to Savanna Consensus
• Recommendations for managing finalizer keys

New License Terms

Antelope Spring is made available under the terms of a Business Source License which is automatically granted for all usages which are Directly in Service of or Materially Dependent on the EOS Blockchain Network. Full details of the license terms may be found in the LICENSE file. Parties seeking a License for other usages may inquire by contacting [email protected].

Release Notes

Notable Changes

A subset of the changes in this release may require node operators and downstream service providers to make configuration changes. At a glance, these include:

• Changes to some HTTP response codes
• Introduced new Snapshot format
• Disabled State Log History compression
• Introduced new State History configuration options
• Introduced new Finalizer configuration options
• Introduced new vote-threads option

For actionable details and recommendations concerning the above changes, please see the Spring 1.0.0 upgrade guide. For complete technical details, consult the Complete Change Log and related pull requests below.

Deprecation Notices

The count field in the response to get_table_by_scope has been deprecated in this release, and will be removed in the next major version of Spring. See the deprecation schedule for more details.

Complete Change Log

Introduced in Spring v1.0.0

Notice

Disable state history log file compression to improve performance. Users who would like to compress files can use other methods outside of nodeos.

Protocol

Adds new chain_plugin option max-reversible-blocks. Specifies the maximum number of reversible blocks beyond current LIB to allow before the node is gracefully shutdown.
New chain api get_finalizer_info with information on finalizers and last votes.
Endpoint get_block_header_state updated for compatibility, and functionality reduced..

Performance

Improve k1 signing performance ~10%, upgrade libsecp256k.
Instead of placing the entire producer proposed schedule in the instant_finality_extension, only put a diff of the producer proposed schedule in the extension.
Instead of placing the entire finalizer set in the instant_finality_extension, only put a diff of the active finalizer policy in the extension.
Allow a larger number of proposer (producers) in Savanna from 125 to 64K. This matches the maximum number of allowed finalizers.
Improve state history performance by using a buffer for the de/compression pipeline.

Internals

Guard against throwing an error write_deatastream's destructor.
P2P to correctly report id of know pending blocks.
Versioning for Finalizer Safety Information file.
P2P to correctly report id of know pending blocks.
Update libsecp256k1 faster speed and matches what Bitcoin Core is using.
Move block time check in speculative mode above watermark check in production mode.
Improve Syncing to handle condition where blocks were received before being applied. Previously this condition caused the node to not ever request the next range of blocks.
cleos support for get_finalizer_info.
More robust syncing to handle unavailable blocks, when client does not have backing blocklog.
Only vote on recent blocks and simply voting by comparing time.
Switch to timestamp for better detection of most recent policy change.
Use lastest_qc_claim block_num in block header.
Add last_pending_finalizer_policy_generation into the finality digest calculation.
Update logic to use latest timestamp to pick winning fork, previously used block height.
Update finality digest adding level 3 commitments.
Update logic to use latest timestamp to pick winning fork, previously used block height.
Add timestamp and parent_timestamp to finality leaf nodes.
Require a QC (quorum certificate) on both finalizer policy sets (active and pending) before considering a QC to have reached quorum on a block with a pending finalizer policy change.
Switch to 2-chain for finality.
For the convenience of finality violation proofs, make the finality digest to commit to the root digest of a Merkle tree over a sequence of records extracted from the sequence of block_refs in the block_refs. This Merkle root digest is called reversible_blocks_root.
Remove unneeded snapshot_block_state_legacy_v7.
Revert previous changes to liveness rule. After evaluation the previous changes reduced liveness, and engineering identified a better solution.
Write out chain_head after vote_processor threads have stopped.
Reduce Log Spam on shutdown.
When a new finalizer policy or proposer policy is proposed in a block, the deep-mind logs should contain an entry associated with the block that contains the full policy (not just the diff). The keys within these policies should have string encoding.
To support ease of use SHiP, finality_data captures a new pending finality policy, including encoded public keys from pending finality data.
Move tracking of Savanna pending LIB into fork database. The fork database is in charge of tracking and persisting cached current pending Savanna LIB.
Refactor ForkDB to consolidate concept of HEAD and better track the pending irreversible block.
Validate QC by bitsize of votes.
More robust block log replay through refactoring head block state management.
Add hardened mode for reproducible builds.
Upgrade to clang v18 in Docker repeatable build. Improvements to reduce Docker build cache.
Clear out the state history log when Savanna transition is forked out.
Improve accuracy of state history by selectively including finalizer policy.
Add cases where we update peer syncing status to more accurately reflect peer syncing from us status.
Improved block id duplication logic to retain the correct state history with replay/resync.
Update application of finalizer policies to avoid edge cases.
[More efficient P2P eliminating multiple requests for the same ran...