lotus/CHANGELOG.md
2020-08-21 14:35:12 -07:00

6.8 KiB

Lotus changelog

0.5.0 / 2020-08-20

This version of Lotus will be used for the incentivized testnet Space Race competition, and can be considered mainnet-ready code. It includes some protocol changes, upgrades of core dependencies, and various bugfixes and UX/performance improvements.

Highlights

Among the highlights included in this release are:

  • Gas changes: We implemented EIP-1559 and introduced real gas values.
  • Deal-making: We now support "Committed Capacity" sectors, "fast-retrieval" deals, and the packing of multiple deals into a single sector.
  • Renamed features: We renamed some of the binaries, environment variables, and default paths associated with a Lotus node.

Gas changes

We made some significant changes to the mechanics of gas in this release.

Network fee

We implemented something similar to Ethereum's EIP-1559. The Message structure had three changes:

  • The GasPrice field has been removed
  • A new GasFeeCap field has been added, which controls the maximum cost the sender incurs for the message
  • A new GasPremium field has been added, which controls the reward a miner earns for including the message

A sender will never be charged more than GasFeeCap * GasLimit. A miner will typically earn GasPremium * GasLimit as a reward.

The Blockheader structure has one new field, called ParentBaseFee. Informally speaking,the ParentBaseFee is increased when blocks are densely packed with messages, and decreased otherwise.

The ParentBaseFee is used when calculating how much a sender burns when executing a message. Burning simply refers to sending attoFIL to a dedicated, unreachable account. A message causes ParentBaseFee * GasUsed attoFIL to be burnt.

Real gas values

This release also includes our first "real" gas costs for primitive operations. The costs were designed to account for both the time that message execution takes, as well as the space a message adds to the state tree.

Deal-making changes

There are three key changes to the deal-making process.

Committed Capacity sectors

Miners can now pledge "Committed Capacity" (CC) sectors, which are explicitly stated as containing junk data, and must not include any deals. Miners can do this to increase their storage power, and win block rewards from this pledged storage.

They can mark these sectors as "upgradable" with lotus-miner sectors mark-for-upgrade. If the miner receives and accepts one or more storage deals, the sector that includes those deals will replace the CC sector. This is intended to maximize the amount of useful storage on the Filecoin network.

Fast-retrieval deals

Clients can now include a fast-retrieval flag when proposing deals with storage miners. If set to true, the miner will include an extra copy of the deal data. This data can be quickly served in a retrieval deal, since it will not need to be unsealed.

Multiple deals per sector

Miners can now pack multiple deals into a single sector, so long as all the deals fit into the sector capacity. This should increase the packing efficiency of miners.

Renamed features

To improve the user experience, we updated several names to mainatin standard prefixing, and to better reflect the meaning of the features being referenced.

In particular, the Lotus miner binary is now called lotus-miner, the default path for miner data is now ~/.lotusminer, and the environment variable that sets the path for miner data is now $LOTUS_MINER_PATH. A full list of renamed features can be found here.

Changelog

Downstream upgrades

Core protocol

Deal-making lifecycle

Enhancements

UX

Contributors

The following contributors had 10 or more commits go into this release. We are grateful for every contribution!

Contributor Commits Lines ±
magik6k 361 +13197/-6136
Kubuxu 227 +5670/-2587
arajasek 120 +2916/-1264
whyrusleeping 112 +3979/-1089
vyzo 99 +3343/-1305
dirkmc 68 +8732/-3621
laser 45 +1489/-501
hannahhoward 43 +2654/-990
frrist 37 +6630/-4338
schomatis 28 +3016/-1368
placer14 27 +824/-350
raulk 25 +28718/-29849
mrsmkl 22 +560/-368
travisperson 18 +1354/-314
nonsense 16 +2956/-2842
ingar 13 +331/-123
daviddias 11 +311/-11
Stebalien 11 +1204/-980
RobQuistNL 10 +69/-74

0.1.0 / 2019-12-11

We are very excited to release lotus 0.1.0. This is our testnet release. To install lotus and join the testnet, please visit lotu.sh. Please file bug reports as issues.

A huge thank you to all contributors for this testnet release!