Community Update 213

Owned by Rao Bhamidipati
Mar 02, 2022

General

Sprint 107 in progress

Main Focus is to prepare the leaderless block merge Hard fork (hf2), specifically (a) Release version 0.13.0 block merge version with single parent, migrate Dev net and Test net to 0.13.0 end of this week (b) work on finalization and multi-parent block merge next week (c) a lot of testing + bug fixing and (d) performance improvements. Other work includes resolving any identified bugs, hardening the network.  Current PR list is at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pulls .  

Release Web API v1 with auto generated OpenAPI Schema (https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/3612) accessible via OpenAPI. 

Existing API which is accessible on /api endpoint will not change but will eventually be deprecated, hence may not be updated with the new features.

Current format has field names as a discriminator for types.

{ ExprInt: 42 }

New format which is more JS friendly.

{ type: "ExprInt", data: 42 }

A v2 API will be created in future that unifies the grpc and HTTP API .

Block merge Hard Fork (hf2)

  1. LLBM: The design for finalization frontier/barrier/fringe calculation and merging is refined and described at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pZDO6Jh5nfgr4tZDGdMJhWKm1rFSGcDghDNo4XVDrBc/ The whole team is focused on resolving any issues with merging of the branches to generate 0.13.0 the single parent block merge version - PR reviews, conflict resolution, bug fixes, completing the tests etc.
  2. Stas is working on API updates to match HF2 in an incremental but automated fashion. He's also created PR to add regression testing for finalization and to generate more block merge test cases (https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/3608)
  3. Denis is investigating the causes of poor performance in Rholang primitive operations as outlined by Tomislav here https://github.com/rchain/rchain/issues/3607.  List, Set and Map are targets for improvement.
  4. Will has been working on generating test snapshots in preparation for the RPC air drop, in addition to block merge tasks.
  5. Support for external customers is ongoing. A lot of the roadmap focus for 2022 will be to discover and enable the features needed for market acceptance and adoption of RChain. As we work with actual projects wanting to deploy on Rchain, we will prioritize the features and performance improvements etc. that they need. The roadmap will be updated to reflect this approach.
  6. Reminder: It's important for all Wallet makers to update their code to match the new implementation where minimum phlo price is a parameter. Please communicate this to any wallets you are using.  Wallets will have to call /api/status to get min phlo price accepted by the validator and put that value in deploy data instead of the currently used constant 1.Tomislav has updated the wiki at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/wiki/Cost-accounting-in-RChain#phloprice We will start communications with exchanges also for HF2.
  7. Status of various Block merge tasks is at
    1. https://github.com/rchain/rchain/projects/4
    2. Current status of updated HF2 task list is at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/issues/3315

Release Plan for the rest of the year and beyond - for reference

Currently planned near term releases are

  1. Block merge release hard fork 2 plus any configuration changes that do not need extensive work - Leaderful and Leaderless block merge
  2. Configuration changes release,
  3. Performance improvements releases (one or more),
  4. Hard Fork 3 with PoS changes and other items,
  5. External validators process validation with trusted community validators (aka Friends & Family) on the test net
  6. Friends & Family validation on the main net
  7. External validators among extended ecosystem (e.g. exchanges, if they're willing)
  8. External validators in the wild.


Explanation of the different Hard Forks (for reference)

Proceeding further with block merge requires changes to the per validator vault to make it a per deploy vault/purse etc. We are currently finalizing the design for this. Actual code and test will take some time. We are potentially looking at this scenario:
1. First hard fork for balances and removing the slashed validator
2. Second hard fork for block merge - This is the fastest way to get block merge on the main net without holding it until the third hard fork. This includes REV balance merging (aka per deploy vault), attestation messages and the Tree depth being increased to 4.
3. Third hard fork with all other changes.  Third hard fork includes implementation of a lot of changes including the PoS contract changes, Soft fork process etc.  Design for soft fork process is complete and is being reviewed by the team.

(Hard Fork) TEST NET 2 ADVISORY: (for reference)

To test the version of block merge with data changes that need a hard fork, we are creating a separate feature branch and a TEST NET 2 as the testbed for this feature branch. This content will be left here until we are close to Hard Fork 2 implementation on the main net. TestNet 2 is now available for the community to test their contracts on.

  1. There will be no guarantees of data storage format compatibility on Test Net 2, as the data storage format changes are incrementally implemented. The anticipated changes are mostly storage level format changes visible only to node operators. We encourage the community to start using Test Net 2 in addition to the current test net, so that we can quickly identify and resolve any issues with the upcoming hard forks. All new development should be targeted to TEST NET 2 and all current code MUST BE tested against TEST NET 2 to ensure future compatibility. 

On all the hard forks on the main net, we will be starting from an empty state, with REV balances only. On Test Net 2, this 'loosing the state' will be repeated multiple times.

Tech-Governance meetings on Fridays 9:30 AM Eastern, 6:30 Am Pacific 

Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria

Details on the acceptance criteria: Mercury acceptance criteria

Please see the documentation at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/blob/dev/docs/features.md. 

Developer website

https://developer.rchain.coop 

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