sigp/lighthouse v0.2.4

Octopus Man

on GitHub

This release provides significant performance and stability improvements in the presently unstable Medalla network. (Note: v0.2.3 was yanked).

Upgrade Notes

IMPORTANT: add the --max-skip-slots 700 flag to your beacon node. E.g., lighthouse bn --http --max-skip-slots 700 otherwise you will be unable to sync

If your node is trying to sync (i.e., not reporting Synced) or you're getting "skipping more than an epoch" warnings, we recommend:

1. Stopping your validator client (it can't do anything useful until the BN is synced, and it'll just slow things down).
2. Remove the database (lighthouse bn --purge-db).
3. Keep an eye on the syncing process, if it becomes stuck for more than 20 minutes, restart the process. There are many nodes on the network returning incorrect or outdated responses, meaning it can take some time for Lighthouse to find good peers.

Known Issues

The turmoil on the Medalla testnet, some bugs in other client implementations and inefficiencies in our own is making it very difficult to sync Medalla. You may need to restart sync if you get stalled and memory/CPU usage will be much higher than usual.

Future release will follow in the coming days with further improvements.

Changes

• Ignore blocks that skip a large distance from their parent (#1530)
  • Helps prevent excess memory usage.
• Revert back to discv5 alpha 8 to maintain ARM support (#1531)
• Ensure RUSTFLAGS is passed through on cross compile (#1529)
• Process gossip blocks on the GossipProcessor (#1523)
  • Provides additional stability.
• Memory usage reduction (#1522)
  • Helps prevent excess memory usage.
• Remove yamux support (#1526)
• Correct logic for peer sync identification (#1525)
• Persist metadata and enr across restarts (#1513)
• Add multiaddr support in bootnodes (#1481)
• Update gossipsub duplicate cache (#1524)
• Update discv5 to alpha.9 (#1517)
• Commit Cargo.lock changes, add build scripts (#1521)
• Update to v0.2.3 (#1519)
• Restrict fork choice getters to finalized blocks (#1475)
  • Fixes some MissingBeaconState errors during attestation processing.
    *Introduce a queue for attestations from the network (#1511)
  • Provides significant performance and stability improvements.
• Log to file without json format (#1485)
  • Default log file format is no longer JSON.
  • JSON is still supported via --log-format JSON.
• Wind down the SSE thread when the client disconnects (#1514)
• Update key-management.md (#1515)
• Fix a bug in fork pruning (#1507)
• Update key-management.md (#1508)
• Prints the version when starting lighthouse (#1506)
• Cross-compile to vendored x86_84, aarch64 (Raspberry Pi 4) (#1497)
• Local testnet fixes (#1499)
• Mitigate too many outgoing connections (#1469)
• Add graffiti cli flag to the validator client. (#1425)
  • Users can now supply --graffiti to the lighthouse vc
• Block error display (#1503)

Binaries

Binaries are supplied for two platforms:

• x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu: AMD/Intel 64-bit processors (most desktops, laptops, servers)
• aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu: 64bit ARM processors (Raspberry Pi 4)

Additionally there is also a -portable suffix which indicates if the portable feature is used:

• Without portable: uses modern CPU instructions to provide the fastest signature verification times (may cause Illegal instruction error on older CPUs)
• With portable: approx. 20% slower, but should work on all modern 64-bit processors.