Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update - 21 February 2020

In this Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update video series, Project Manager Dimitris Poulopoulos will be taking you through the updates on a regular basis.

Full script of the video below:

Hi everyone. It is Dimitris again, back for another week to share a quick update on the Shelley Incentivised Testnet progress.

Thanks for all your continued feedback on these weekly video updates.

It’s been great to get your thoughts on how we can improve them; we will continue to try to bring you more useful information going forward. Recap Network stability remains our focus for another week.

Following last weeks’ Node, Wallet BE and Daedalus release some new issues have been identified for out Daedalus users, which we are aiming to mitigate with a new release that will be available in the coming days.

This week, we have released a new Node version 0.8.11 to include some further amendments aimed to address the bootstrapping issues. Target is to continue to improve the experience for both stake pool operators and ADA holders.

Jormungandr

This week’s Jormungandr release aims to provide some further improvements in the bootstrap, and network stability. Key updates include: The node has significantly increased flexibility on the bootstrapping process. It can now:

  • bootstrap the larger than normal block0 from a HTTP url
  • do trusted local startup by using --genesis-block0-hash together with --genesis-block0 default to bootstrap from a more diverse set of peers which is received from the trusted peers, although we kept the old behaviour with the config stanza bootstrap_from_trusted_peers.

The node now requires the trusted peers to not be empty, which will be a hard error soon, and there is a skip_bootstrap configuration field that allows to run as a self-node or allow what many of you have been doing by removing the trusted peers, although we hope it’s not necessary anymore.

Poldercast is now updated to 0.11.3 which set some limits to the general size of what we know about the network to prevent wheel spinning on a unbounded size of gossip, and the code has made progress toward integrating to Poldercast 0.12.This should address the performance issues with the unbounded set of Nodes in the Network.

Chain-libs has been updated, and now pool parameters update will block fee changes, although we hope to restore fee reductions as soon as possible, and maybe start a dialogue on how to properly do fee increasing also.

Finally the fragment subsystem is now lockless and more efficient, one step further towards making sure we don’t lock other parts of the system, or introduce long delays around block creation.

More details may be found as always on the Jormungandr repo under the latest release tag https://github.com/input-output-hk/jo…

Coming next week

Daedalus and Wallet BE

Next week we are releasing a new version of Daedalus (2.2.0-ITN1) with new transaction filtering and pending delegation features and fixes for the issues from the previous release. This Daedalus release will be bundled with an updated wallet backend which will include minor fixes and new Jormungandr release which was released this week.

We will let you know as soon as this new Wallet version is available and if you are running your Daedalus rewards wallet you will get notified through Daedalus newsfeed. Jormungandr We continue to move to Rust’s async/await that will allow us to write cleaner and more concise code and also to improve performance a lot. Further improvements we are targeting include: - Network Blacklisting from config file - Spikes of TCP connections before getting stuck - Enclave avoid duplicated Leaders

Side updates

Support: This week our support team has been receiving tickets related to wallet restoration and specifically the error messages “the wallet already exists” and “an error occurred” when trying to restore a wallet. The provided workaround has partially solved those issues. The majority of remaining tickets are related to difficulties with connecting and synchronizing, which we anticipate to solve by further tweaking and adjusting the network. Finally some MacOS “Catalina” users have been reporting incidents with Daedalus Rewards installation, which is a known problem. We are expecting to alleviate a large number of issues with the next release.

New Incidents - 692
Resolved Incidents - 422
Incident Backlog - 1,875

DevOps: We’ve increased the number of Trusted Peers and made them all available to Daedalus users to increase bootstrapping probability.

I hope you found this short update useful. I’ll be back next week with the latest on ITN progress.

Thank you for watching!

1 Like

So Mac users have to wait for another wallet release??