This release introduces a hard fork that activates at height 1275480, approximately 2023-10-04 14:00 UTC.
New features
Flexible Merkle Tree Combinations
When combining different data transactions, the merkle trees for each data root can be added to the larger merkle tree without being rebuilt or modified. This makes it easier, quicker, and less CPU-intensive to combine together multiple data transactions.
A reference implementation for building rebased merkle trees and further documentation on their structure is in progress! It will be shared ASAP.
VDF Retargeting
The average VDF speed across the network is now tracked and used to increase or decrease the VDF difficulty so as to maintain a roughly 1-second VDF time across the network.
Bug fixes and other updates
Delay the pricing transition
This release introduces a patch that adds to the transition period before the activation of Arweave 2.6’s trustless price oracle, in order to give miners additional time to on-board packed data to the network. The release delays the onset of the transition window to roughly Dec. 14, 2023.
Memory optimization when mining
This change allows the mining server to periodically reclaim memory. Previously when a miner was configured with a suitably high mining_server_chunk_cache_size_limit (e.g. 5,000-7,000 per installed GB of RAM) memory usage would creep up, sometimes causing an out of memory error. With this change, that memory usage can be periodically reclaimed, delaying or eliminating the OOM error. Further performance and memory improvements are planned in the next release.
Start form local state
Introduce the start_from_latest_state and start_from_block configuration options allowing a miner to be launched from their local state rather than downloading the initialization data from peers. Most useful when bootstrapping a testnet.
Ensure genesis transaction data is served via the /tx endpoint
Fix for issue #455
The release comes with the prebuilt binaries for the Linux x86_64 platforms.
If you want to run the miner from the existing Git folder, execute the following command:
git fetch --all --tags && git checkout -f N.2.7.0
See the Mining Guide for further instructions.
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.