v13.0.0

Release notes:

Protocol changes

This release is the first release that supports protocol version 13:

• CAP-0015 - Fee-Bump Transactions
• CAP-0018 - Fine-Grained Control of Authorization
• CAP-0027 - First-class multiplexed accounts
• CAP-0028 - Clear pre-auth transaction signer on failed transactions
• CAP-0030 - Remove NO_ISSUER Operation Results

Stability improvements

• Made changes to the way we internally process items from connections and general work to be more fair. This avoids situations where some events would cause arbitrary delays in other parts of the system.
• Fixed issues in how we ask other peers for data that we need during consensus rounds. This reduces the time it takes to propagate SCP messages.
• Fixed issues in how parameters to command line catchup were inconsistently processed leading to not always exactly replaying the desired range.
• Avoid flooding failed transactions in some edge cases.
• Improved some edge cases for cleaning up the mempool, that would lead to certain transactions getting temporarily stuck.
• Fixed issues in the simulation code used to run performance analysis.
• Made catchup messages clearer.
• Fixed bugs in the survey script that were causing surveys to stop too early.
• Command line catchup was reporting a bogus 0 when catching up to the latest ledger.

New features

• New metrics were added to get an idea of how long transactions sit in the mempool.
• Support for pipes when using the experimental mode to stream meta when closing ledgers.
• Simulator can now force update protocol version

Breaking changes

• Support for the old v1 meta format was dropped ahead of protocol 13 support. Downstream systems must now use the meta v2 format that can represent pre-post meta properly.
• The metric ledger.age.closed has been changed from a Timer into a Bucket as to allow systems to perform lossless aggregation of the metric over large periods of time.

v13.0.0rc3

Release notes:

Protocol changes

This release is the first release that supports protocol version 13:

• CAP-0015 - Fee-Bump Transactions
• CAP-0018 - Fine-Grained Control of Authorization
• CAP-0027 - First-class multiplexed accounts
• CAP-0028 - Clear pre-auth transaction signer on failed transactions
• CAP-0030 - Remove NO_ISSUER Operation Results

Stability improvements

• Made changes to the way we internally process items from connections and general work to be more fair. This avoids situations where some events would cause arbitrary delays in other parts of the system.
• Fixed issues in how we ask other peers for data that we need during consensus rounds. This reduces the time it takes to propagate SCP messages.
• Fixed issues in how parameters to command line catchup were inconsistently processed leading to not always exactly replaying the desired range.
• Avoid flooding failed transactions in some edge cases.
• Improved some edge cases for cleaning up the mempool, that would lead to certain transactions getting temporarily stuck.
• Fixed issues in the simulation code used to run performance analysis.
• Made catchup messages clearer.
• Fixed bugs in the survey script that were causing surveys to stop too early.
• Command line catchup was reporting a bogus 0 when catching up to the latest ledger.

New features

• New metrics were added to get an idea of how long transactions sit in the mempool.
• Support for pipes when using the experimental mode to stream meta when closing ledgers.
• Simulator can now force update protocol version

Breaking changes

• Support for the old v1 meta format was dropped ahead of protocol 13 support. Downstream systems must now use the meta v2 format that can represent pre-post meta properly.
• The metric ledger.age.closed has been changed from a Timer into a Bucket as to allow systems to perform lossless aggregation of the metric over large periods of time.

v13.0.0rc2

Release notes:

Protocol changes

This release is the first release that supports protocol version 13:

• CAP-0015 - Fee-Bump Transactions
• CAP-0018 - Fine-Grained Control of Authorization
• CAP-0027 - First-class multiplexed accounts
• CAP-0028 - Clear pre-auth transaction signer on failed transactions
• CAP-0030 - Remove NO_ISSUER Operation Results

Stability improvements

• Made changes to the way we internally process items from connections and general work to be more fair. This avoids situations where some events would cause arbitrary delays in other parts of the system.
• Fixed issues in how we ask other peers for data that we need during consensus rounds. This reduces the time it takes to propagate SCP messages.
• Fixed issues in how parameters to command line catchup were inconsistently processed leading to not always exactly replaying the desired range.
• Avoid flooding failed transactions in some edge cases.
• Improved some edge cases for cleaning up the mempool, that would lead to certain transactions getting temporarily stuck.
• Fixed issues in the simulation code used to run performance analysis.
• Made catchup messages clearer.
• Fixed bugs in the survey script that were causing surveys to stop too early.
• Command line catchup was reporting a bogus 0 when catching up to the latest ledger.

New features

• New metrics were added to get an idea of how long transactions sit in the mempool.
• Support for pipes when using the experimental mode to stream meta when closing ledgers.
• Simulator can now force update protocol version

Breaking changes

• Support for the old v1 meta format was dropped ahead of protocol 13 support. Downstream systems must now use the meta v2 format that can represent pre-post meta properly.
• The metric ledger.age.closed has been changed from a Timer into a Bucket as to allow systems to perform lossless aggregation of the metric over large periods of time.

v13.0.0rc1

Release notes:

Protocol changes

This release is the first release that supports protocol version 13:

• CAP-0015 - Fee-Bump Transactions
• CAP-0018 - Fine-Grained Control of Authorization
• CAP-0027 - First-class multiplexed accounts
• CAP-0028 - Clear pre-auth transaction signer on failed transactions
• CAP-0030 - Remove NO_ISSUER Operation Results

Stability improvements

• Made changes to the way we internally process items from connections and general work to be more fair. This avoids situations where some events would cause arbitrary delays in other parts of the system.
• Fixed issues in how we ask other peers for data that we need during consensus rounds. This reduces the time it takes to propagate SCP messages.
• Fixed issues in how parameters to command line catchup were inconsistently processed leading to not always exactly replaying the desired range.
• Improved some edge cases for cleaning up the mempool, that would lead to certain transactions getting temporarily stuck.
• Fixed issues in the simulation code used to run performance analysis.
• Made catchup messages clearer.
• Fixed bugs in the survey script that were causing surveys to stop too early.
• Command line catchup was reporting a bogus 0 when catching up to the latest ledger.

New features

• New metrics were added to get an idea of how long transactions sit in the mempool.
• Support for pipes when using the experimental mode to stream meta when closing ledgers.
• Simulator can now force update protocol version

Breaking changes

• Support for the old v1 meta format was dropped ahead of protocol 13 support. Downstream systems must now use the meta v2 format that can represent pre-post meta properly.
• The metric ledger.age.closed has been changed from a Timer into a Bucket as to allow systems to perform lossless aggregation of the metric over large periods of time.

v12.5.0

Stability improvements

• Reworked catchup code to improve its resiliency with events like running out of sync
• Improved logging and status when catching up, which gives a lot more visibility into what core is doing
• Changed the way we track percentiles reported by the metrics endpoint, with this version percentiles are using a fixed 5 minutes window, this results in percentiles to be a lot more consistent and accurate
• Fixed a hang on shutdown where core was waiting for quorum intersection to complete
• Improved how validators restart, avoiding momentarily not validating (ie, not sending SCP votes) for certain ledgers.
• SCP code code cleanup to make it easier to understand
• Fixed how we compute prefetching metrics
• Fix an issue in experimental metadata generation as certain syscalls are not supported on named pipes
• mempool, don’t bother with transactions that will fail later anyways
• Fixed various test issues - missing tests and flaky test

New features

• Added new SCP metrics to help track if a validator is behind the network or if other validators are behind a validator

Breaking changes

None

v12.5.0rc2

Release notes:

Stability improvements

• Reworked catchup code to improve its resiliency with events like running out of sync
• Improved logging and status when catching up, which gives a lot more visibility into what core is doing
• Changed the way we track percentiles reported by the metrics endpoint, with this version percentiles are using a fixed 5 minutes window, this results in percentiles to be a lot more consistent and accurate
• Fixed a hang on shutdown where core was waiting for quorum intersection to complete
• Improved how validators restart, avoiding momentarily not validating (ie, not sending SCP votes) for certain ledgers.
• SCP code code cleanup to make it easier to understand
• Fixed how we compute prefetching metrics
• Fix an issue in experimental metadata generation as certain syscalls are not supported on named pipes
• mempool, don’t bother with transactions that will fail later anyways
• Fixed various test issues - missing tests and flaky test

New features

• Added new SCP metrics to help track if a validator is behind the network or if other validators are behind a validator

Breaking changes

None

v12.5.0rc1

Release notes:

Stability improvements

• Improved logging and status when catching up, which gives a lot more visibility into what core is doing
• Changed the way we track percentiles reported by the metrics endpoint, with this version percentiles are using a fixed 5 minutes window, this results in percentiles to be a lot more consistent and accurate
• Fixed a hang on shutdown where core was waiting for quorum intersection to complete
• Improved how validators restart, avoiding momentarily not validating (ie, not sending SCP votes) for certain ledgers.
• SCP code code cleanup to make it easier to understand
• Fix an issue in experimental metadata generation as certain syscalls are not supported on named pipes
• mempool, don’t bother with transactions that will fail later anyways
• Fixed various test issues - missing tests and flaky test

New features

• Added new SCP metrics to help track if a validator is behind the network or if other validators are behind a validator

Breaking changes

None

v12.4.0

This release makes critical improvements to the way nodes communicate in the peer to peer network which should mitigate latency spikes.

Stability improvements

• Batch network calls to speed up transfer rate between peers (large impact on network performance)
• Fix an issue that would cause delays while downloading values during consensus (large impact on network performance)
• Improved the way we throttle transactions during spikes
• Improved logging
• Disable publish to archive in simulation mode
• Fixed an edge condition that could crash validators

New features

• Added a new json option to dump-xdr to improve interfacing with other systems
• Added dev container support for developers using VS Code.

Breaking changes

none

v12.4.0rc1

This release makes critical improvements to the way nodes communicate in the peer to peer network which should mitigate latency spikes.

Stability improvements

• Batch network calls to speed up transfer rate between peers (large impact on network performance)
• Fix an issue that would cause delays while downloading values during consensus (large impact on network performance)
• Improved the way we throttle transactions during spikes
• Improved logging
• Disable publish to archive in simulation mode
• Fixed an edge condition that could crash validators

New features

• Added a new json option to dump-xdr to improve interfacing with other systems
• Added dev container support for developers using VS Code.

Breaking changes

none

v12.3.0

Stability improvements

• Fixed a bug in meta data generation on older versions of the protocol, this would cause internal errors to attach invalid meta that could confuse downstream systems
• Fixed a bug in the liabilities invariant that would not detect certain classes of issues
• Removed index on account database, this increases performance post inflation removal
• Change default encoding used in postgres tables this helps increase performance of postgres deployments
  • NB: this may cause stellar-core to hang on “Applying DB schema upgrade to version 12” for a few seconds, the first time this version runs.
• C++ compliance fixes
• Increase default page size for sqlite this improves performance when running with sqlite
• Add logging to help with diagnostics with corrupt state
• Fix a crash when stopping core while it’s catching up
• Change the way we track quorums in memory this reduces memory pressure when performing quorum intersection computation
• Improve the way we keep track of data used during consensus
• Fix build when building with both libc++ and the option enable-extra-checks, this allows generating “checked” builds with more paranoid checks enabled
• Fixed a race when catching up that could crash core in some cases
• Fixed the computation of percentiles when reporting metrics where the percentiles were computed from bad data

New features

• Added network topology survey that allows validators to perform analysis on the overall network’s connectivity graph. This will also allow us to make deeper changes to the P2P networking code.
  • Added survey script that illustrates how to use the new survey code.
• Added an experimental feature for generating meta data without inserting it into the database while replaying in memory, this allows to speed up meta data generation (for historical data) by several orders of magnitude
• Added a warning message when maintenance is clearly misconfigured
• Added mode for testing network subsystems
• Added new metrics for reporting on time spent in I/O queues

Breaking changes

None