Release summary

Since the last release in Dec. the priority for work has been to improve platform stability. This release includes some of this work. A complete view of the stability work effort and status is shown below.

Block streaming

A requirement of the RChain node is to handle blocks of arbitrary sizes. That means that if node receives a block that can physically fit into its memory then that block should be handled, if it does not fit into the memory, then it’s not handled, but the receiving node will not crash and continue operating. RNode v0.8.2 adds retries for client streaming queue and transport streaming queue and storing incoming blobs to a file and consuming them from that file.

Communications

This version of RNode delivers a fix for a bug found in the Kademlia protocol.

Consensus

A priority for the team is bringing stability to the platform. This includes addressing consensus-related bugs. This version of RNode includes three of these fixes.  

Continuous integration

To improve and automate testing of new code commits and to streamline the review and merge process, we implemented Bors to the PR process during the last sprint. Work in this release reflects this implementation and optimization of Bors. We enjoy the improved testing cadence and significantly reduced time to test and merge PRs.

Metrics and monitoring

With this release we introduce a new implementation of the metrics API. The previous implementation heavily used resources and did not fully support the needs of the SRE team and RNode operators. This new implementation exchanges the use of gauges for histograms, removes and adds new metrics to better support SRE and RNode operator needs, and adds support for reporting with Prometheus and InfluxDB.

Test infrastructure

This release includes improved test coverage for Casper, a tool for visualizing the dag (See User guide for running RNode for details and instructions for use.), and optimizations for some tests. This work supports the team investigating bugs related to assuring platform stability. Work in this release also supports our collaboration with Whiteblock. See the first test plan at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/blob/dev/docs/whiteblock-test-plan.md.

Work completed for this release

Description of release packaging

Release packaging will include:

• Docker image (Supported on Linux only)

• Debian package 

• RPM package

• .zip file

• tar.gz file

• Brew installation

Where do developers go to learn more and get started?

Please visit our release page on GitHub for binary artifacts.

A docker image is available 

docker pull rchain/rnode

Homebrew installation via

brew install rchain/rchain/rnode

Where will bugs be filed?

We use Jira to collect bugs and feedback. File a bug

Where do developers go for support? 

Please visit https://developer.rchain.coop or file a bug.

What license will this be released under?

The RChain software is licensed under Apache License, version 2.0

Rholang is licensed under the MIT License (MIT)

The Docker image is licensed under the GPL 2.0 License

Work completed since last release