github ipfs/kubo v0.4.21
Release v0.4.21
on GitHub

latest releases: v0.28.0, v0.28.0-rc1, v0.27.0...
4 years ago

We're happy to announce go-ipfs 0.4.21. This release has some critical bug fixes and a handful of new features so every user should upgrade.

Key bug fixes:

  • Too many open file descriptors/too many peers (#6237).
  • Adding multiple files at the same time doesn't work (#6254).
  • CPU utilization spikes and then holds at 100% (#5613).

Key features:

  • Experimental TLS1.3 support (to eventually replace secio).
  • OpenSSL support for SECIO handshakes (performance improvement).

IMPORTANT: This release fixes a bug in our security transport that could potentially drop data from the channel. Note: This issue affects neither the privacy nor the integrity of the data with respect to a third-party attacker. Only the peer sending us data could trigger this bug.

ALL USERS MUST UPGRADE. We intended to introduce a feature this release that, unfortunately, reliably triggered this bug. To avoid partitioning the network, we've decided to postpone this feature for a release or two.

Specifically, we're going to provide a minimum one month upgrade period. After that, we'll start testing the impact of deploying the proposed changes.

If you're running the mainline go-ipfs, please upgrade ASAP. If you're building a separate app or working on a forked go-ipfs, make sure to upgrade github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-secio to at least v0.0.3.

Contributors

First off, we'd like to give a shout-out to all contributors that participated in this release (including contributions to ipld, libp2p, and multiformats):

Contributor Commits Lines ± Files Changed
Steven Allen 220 +6078/-4211 520
Łukasz Magiera 53 +5039/-4557 274
vyzo 179 +2929/-1704 238
Raúl Kripalani 44 +757/-1895 134
hannahhoward 11 +755/-1005 49
Marten Seemann 16 +862/-203 44
keks 10 +359/-110 12
Jan Winkelmann 8 +368/-26 16
Jakub Sztandera 4 +361/-8 7
Adrian Lanzafame 1 +287/-18 5
Erik Ingenito 4 +247/-28 8
Reid 'arrdem' McKenzie 1 +220/-20 3
Yusef Napora 26 +98/-130 26
Michael Avila 3 +116/-59 8
Raghav Gulati 13 +145/-26 13
tg 1 +41/-33 1
Matt Joiner 6 +41/-30 7
Cole Brown 1 +37/-25 1
Dominic Della Valle 2 +12/-40 4
Overbool 1 +50/-0 2
Christopher Buesser 3 +29/-16 10
myself659 1 +38/-5 2
Alex Browne 3 +30/-8 3
jmank88 1 +27/-4 2
Vikram 1 +25/-1 2
MollyM 7 +17/-9 7
Marcin Rataj 1 +17/-1 1
requilence 1 +11/-4 1
Teran McKinney 1 +8/-2 1
Oli Evans 1 +5/-5 1
Masashi Salvador Mitsuzawa 1 +5/-1 1
chenminjian 1 +4/-0 1
Edgar Lee 1 +3/-1 1
Dirk McCormick 1 +2/-2 2
ia 1 +1/-1 1
Alan Shaw 1 +1/-1 1

Bug Fixes And Enhancements

This release includes quite a number of critical bug fixes and performance/reliability enhancements.

Error when adding multiple files

The last release broke the simple command ipfs add file1 file2. It turns out we simply lacked a test case for this. Both of these issues (the bug and the lack of a test case) have now been fixed.

SECIO

As noted above, we've fixed a bug that could cause data to be dropped from a SECIO connection on read. Specifically, this happens when:

  1. The capacity of the read buffer is greater than the length.
  2. The remote peer sent more than the length but less than the capacity in a single secio "frame".

In this case, we'd fill the read buffer to it's capacity instead of its length.

Too many open files, too many peers, etc.

Go-ipfs automatically closes the least useful connections when it accumulates too many connections. Unfortunately, some relayed connections were blocking in Close(), halting the entire process.

Out of control CPU usage

Many users noted out of control CPU usage this release. This turned out to be a long-standing issue with how the DHT handled provider records (records recording which peers have what content):

  1. It wasn't removing provider records for content until the set of providers completely emptied.
  2. It was loading every provider record into memory whenever we updated the set of providers.

Combined, these two issues were trashing the provider record cache, forcing the DHT to repeatedly load and discard provider records.

More Reliable Connection Management

Go-ipfs has a subsystem called the "connection manager" to close the least-useful connections when go-ipfs runs low on resources.

Unfortunately, other IPFS subsystems may learn about connections before the connection manager. Previously, if some IPFS subsystem tried to mark a connection as useful before the connection manager learned about it, the connection manager would discard this information. We believe this was causing #6271. It no longer does that.

Improved Bitswap Connection Management

Bitswap now uses the connection manager to mark all peers downloading blocks as important (while downloading). Previously, it only marked peers from which it was downloading blocks.

Reduced Memory Usage

The most noticeable memory reduction in this release comes from fixing connection closing. However, we've made a few additional improvements:

  • Bitswap's "work queue" no longer remembers every peer it has seen indefinitely.
  • The peerstore now interns protocol names.
  • The per-peer goroutine count has been reduced.
  • The DHT now wastes less memory on idle peers by pooling buffered writers and returning them to the pool when not actively using them.

Increased File Descriptor Limit

The default file descriptor limit has been raised to 8192 (from 2048). Unfortunately, go-ipfs behaves poorly when it runs out of file descriptors and it uses a lot of file descriptors.

Luckily, most modern kernels can handle thousands of file descriptors without any difficulty.

Commands

This release brings no new commands but does introduce a few changes, bugfixes, and enhancements. This section is hardly complete but it lists the most noticeable changes.

Take note: this release also introduces a few breaking changes.

[DEPRECATION] The URLStore Command Deprecated

The experimental ipfs urlstore command is now deprecated. Please use ipfs add --nocopy URL instead.

[BREAKING] The DHT Command Base64 Encodes Values

When responding to an ipfs dht get command, the daemon now encodes the returned value using base64. The ipfs command will automatically decode this value before returning it to the user so this change should only affect those using the HTTP API directly.

Unfortunately, this change was necessary as DHT records are arbitrary binary blobs which can't be directly stored in JSON strings.

[BREAKING] Base32 Encoded v1 CIDs By Default

Both js-ipfs and go-ipfs now encode CIDv1 CIDs using base32 by default, instead of base58. Unfortunately, base58 is case-sensitive and doesn't play well with browsers (see #4143.

Human Readable Numbers

The ipfs bitswap stat and and ipfs object stat commands now support a --humanize flag that formats numbers with human-readable units (GiB, MiB, etc.).

Improved Errors

This release improves two types of errors:

  1. Commands that take paths/multiaddrs now include the path/multiaddr in the error message when it fails to parse.
  2. ipfs swarm connect now returns a detailed error describing which addresses were tried and why the dial failed.

Ping Improvements

The ping command has received some small improvements and fixes:

  1. It now exits with a non-zero exit status on failure.
  2. It no longer succeeds with zero successful pings if we have a zombie but non-functional connection to the peer being pinged (#6298).
  3. It now prints out the average latency when canceled with ^C (like the unix ping command).

Features

This release is primarily a bug fix release but it still includes two nice features from libp2p.

Experimental TLS1.3 support

Go-ipfs now has experimental TLS1.3 support. Currently, libp2p (IPFS's networking library) uses a custom TLS-like protocol we call SECIO. However, the conventional wisdom concerning custom security transports is "just don't" so we are working on replacing it with TLS1.3

To choose this protocol by default, set the Experimental.PreferTLS config variable: 

> ipfs config --bool Experimental.PreferTLS true

Why TLS1.3 and not X (noise, etc.)?

  1. Libp2p allows negotiating transports so there's no reason not to add noise support to libp2p as well.
  2. TLS has wide language support which should make implementing libp2p for new languages significantly simpler.

OpenSSL Support

Go-ipfs can now (optionally) be built with OpenSSL support for improved performance when establishing connections. This is primarily useful for nodes receiving multiple inbound connections per second.

To enable openssl support, rebuild go-ipfs with: 

> make build GOFLAGS=-tags=openssl

CoreAPI

The CoreAPI refactor is still underway and we've made significant progress towards a usable ipfs-as-a-library constructor. Specifically, we've integrated the fx dependency injection system and are now working on cleaning up our initialization logic. This should make it easier to inject new services into a go-ipfs process without messing with the core internals.

Build: GOCC Environment Variable

Build system now uses GOCC environment variable allowing for use of specific go versions during builds.

Changelog

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