Oxen 11.6.0, now with Session Router

This OPTIONAL oxen-core Session Node update adds Session Router to the Session Node requirements. Session Router is the result of a long, deep rewrite of Lokinet that will form the basis of private, anonymous, secure network communications in future versions of Session.

Installing the 11.6 update (including Session Router) will help Session developers test the network at a larger scale as Session Router is further refined and developed as the app’s communication base layer. Session Router will become required for all Session Nodes in a future mandatory upgrade, but for now is only required for operators who upgrade to oxend 11.6.0.

Note that if you are using a firewall, the new Session Router code requires communication on a new port, UDP port 1190 by default.

See the Session Router release notes for more details.

Ubuntu 20.04 end of life

Note that this release (and any future releases) no longer support Ubuntu 20.04 (aka Ubuntu "focal"), as has been warned about for the past few months of releases. 20.04 is no longer supported by Ubuntu as of June of this year, and it is strongly recommended for anyone still running Session Nodes on Ubuntu 20.04 to upgrade to 22.04 (or better yet, 24.04) as soon as possible. The official deb packages now require Ubuntu 22.04+, or Debian 11+, and Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian 13 are recommended if starting up a new Session node server.

multi-sn

Session Node operators on more powerful servers using the "multi-sn" scripts MUST run oxen-multi-sn-upgrade after upgrading the packages to generate and set up the required multi-sn configurations and services for Session Router.

(If you have no idea what this means, you can ignore this section.)

Other changes

• Fixed a warning about a rewards database value mismatch. The values used for the warnings were incorrectly calculated: the database actually does not contain an incorrect value. This corrects the warnings calculation to stop the message from appearing.

• The debian and ubuntu packages now use jemalloc for memory allocation, which should reduce the amount of memory that long-running oxend processes use.

• Various library dependency updates and small compilation fixes needed on newer systems.

(This release will be updated with static binary builds in the near future once they are also available for Session Router itself).