seedhammer/dcrd
seedhammer/dcrd
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity
5a461dae5c
dcrd/docs/release-notes/release-notes-1.2.0.md
Dave Collins c2b9ca89dc
docs: Add several historical release notes.
2020-07-31 18:56:41 -05:00

25 KiB
Raw Blame History

dcrd v1.2.0

This release of dcrd contains significant performance enhancements, infrastructure improvements, improved access to chain-related information for providing better SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) support, and other quality assurance changes.

A significant amount of infrastructure work has also been done this release cycle towards being able to support several planned scalability optimizations.

Downgrade Warning

The database format in v1.2.0 is not compatible with previous versions of the software. This only affects downgrades as users upgrading from previous versions will see a one time database migration.

Once this migration has been completed, it will no longer be possible to downgrade to a previous version of the software without having to delete the database and redownload the chain.

Notable Changes

Significantly Faster Startup

The startup time has been improved by roughly 17x on slower hard disk drives (HDDs) and 8x on solid state drives (SSDs).

In order to achieve these speedups, there is a one time database migration, as previously mentioned, that will likely take a while to complete (typically around 5 to 6 minutes on HDDs and 2 to 3 minutes on SSDs).

Support For DNS Seed Filtering

In order to better support the forthcoming SPV wallets, support for finding other peers based upon their enabled services has been added. This is useful for both SPV wallets and full nodes since SPV wallets will require access to full nodes in order to retrieve the necessary proofs and full nodes are generally not interested in making outgoing connections to SPV wallets.

Committed Filters

With the intention of supporting light clients, such as SPV wallets, in a privacy-preserving way while still minimizing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded, this release adds support for committed filters. A committed filter is a combination of a probalistic data structure that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set with a predetermined collision probability along with a commitment by consensus-validating full nodes to that data.

A committed filter is created for every block which allows light clients to download the filters and match against them locally rather than uploading personal data to other nodes.

A new service flag is also provided to allow clients to discover nodes that provide access to filters.

There is a one time database update to build and store the filters for all existing historical blocks which will likely take a while to complete (typically around 2 to 3 minutes on HDDs and 1 to 1.5 minutes on SSDs).

Updated Atomic Swap Contracts

The standard checks for atomic swap contracts have been updated to ensure the contracts enforce the secret size for safer support between chains with disparate script rules.

RPC Server Changes

New getchaintips RPC

A new RPC named getchaintips has been added which allows callers to query information about the status of known side chains and their branch lengths. It currently only provides support for side chains that have been seen while the current instance of the process is running. This will be further improved in future releases.

Changelog

All commits since the last release may be viewed on GitHub here.

Protocol and network:

Transaction relay (memory pool):

RPC:

dcrd command-line flags and configuration:

checkdevpremine utility changes:

Documentation:

Developer-related package changes:

Testing and Quality Assurance:

Misc:

Code Contributors (alphabetical order):

  • Andrew Chiw
  • Daniel Krawsiz
  • Dave Collins
  • David Hill
  • Donald Adu-Poku
  • Javed Khan
  • Jolan Luff
  • Jon Gillham
  • Josh Rickmar
  • Markus Richter
  • Matheus Degiovani
  • Ryan Vacek