The release introduces various improvements aiming to improve peering, block propagation, and data synchronization. Also, a bug is fixed that would reduce the node's mining performance.
- Blocks and transactions are now served, gossiped, and fetched in the binary format (between the upgraded nodes). It reduces ~30% of the communicated traffic and speeds up processing;
- chunks are also served in the new binary format;
- the node sends compact block announcements to inform upgraded peers about the new blocks. The protocol allows the recipient to notify the sender of the missing transactions early and receive them along with the block header; also, the recipient may ask the sender to not include the recall chunk and fetch it themselves;
- a block_gossip_peer configuration parameter is added to give miners the ability to specify priority block recipients manually;
- blocks and transactions are propagated to the peers from the unique subnetworks first;
- added GET /hash_list/[from]/[to]. The endpoint serves a JSON list of Base64Url encoded hashes of the blocks between the given heights (inclusive), sorted from latest to earliest;
- processing chunks is made more efficient.
API changes
- New endpoints: GET /hash_list/[from]/[to], POST /block2, POST /tx2, GET /tx2/[id], GET /block2/hash/[hash], GET /block2/height/[height], GET /chunk2/[offset], GET /block_index2, GET /recent_hash_list_diff.
Upgrade instructions
N.2.5.2 comes with the prebuilt binaries for the Linux and Darwin x86_64 platforms. arweave-2.5.2.linux-x86_64.tar.gz works at least on Ubuntu 20 and CentOS 8. To run on Ubuntu 18, grab arweave-2.5.2.ub18-x86_64.tar.gz. CentOS 7 is not supported.
Download the corresponding archive and unpack it:
tar -xzf arweave-2.5.2.0.linux-x86_64.tar.gz
It makes sense to unpack it inside a dedicated directory. You can always move this directory around, but the miner may not work if you move only some of the files. The weave data would, by default, be stored in this directory, too, but it can be overridden using the data_dir command-line argument.
The archive contents look like this:
bin/ data/ erts-10.3/ lib/ releases/
To run the miner, execute ./bin/start . See the mining guide for more details.
If your OS/platform architecture is not on the list, check README for how to build the miner from sources.
If you want to run the miner from the existing Git folder, upgrade Erlang to version 23 or 24 and execute the following command:
git fetch --all --tags && git checkout -f N.2.5.2
You can now run the miner using the arweave-server script.
Support
For more details on how to run a mining node, please see our mining guide - https://docs.arweave.org/info/mining/mining-guide. If you have any issues upgrading or would like to know more about the release, feel free to reach out to us in the Arweave Miners Discord (https://discord.gg/GHB4fxVv8B) or email us at team@arweave.org.