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Consensus Team Update

· 4 min read
Damian Nadales
Damian Nadales
Consensus Team Lead

High level summary​

  • Leios prototype and testnet (Treasury Funding Initiative 4: Ouroboros Leios Implementation):
    • Added endorser-block announcements to the node. The node now generates them and sends them to its peers. An announcement tells a peer that an endorser block exists, before the block itself arrives. The other Leios components do not use the announcements yet. This change is the first step (#2132, for ouroboros-leios#772).
    • Added announcements to the proto-devnet demo, with a new graph of the announcement age on arrival. The demo can now run a line topology. In that topology the first and third nodes have no direct link. This makes the announcement behaviour easier to watch (#1002).
    • Made the node reject malformed Dijkstra blocks. A block body must not carry both a Leios certificate and transactions. The header flag must also agree with the body content (#2178, for ouroboros-leios#932).
    • Released a new prototype, prototype-2026w32 (#6636).
    • Fixed the testnet visualizer. It lost events and reported send and receive counts that did not match. It now reads the log store with range queries instead of a live stream (#1000).
    • Corrected the units on the throughput dashboard. The certification graph now covers every node, not only the first (#1001).
  • Node performance (Treasury Funding Initiative 17: Maintenance and Support):
    • Removed the allocations from the comparison of transaction identifiers. The old code rebuilt a 32-byte hash on each comparison. The mempool and local queries use that code path heavily. Comparisons now run about five times faster and allocate nothing (#2125, for #2003).
    • Cut the allocations in the mempool snapshot code (#2195).
    • Simplified how the mempool moves a transaction into a newer era. The mempool now decodes the transaction straight into the target era. It no longer steps through each era in between (#2134).
  • Releases and the next hard fork (Treasury Funding Initiative 17: Maintenance and Support):
    • Released ouroboros-consensus 4.0.0.0 and 4.1 (#2161, #2189).
    • Allowed the node to hard fork into Dijkstra, the next Cardano era (#2167).
  • Storage and snapshots (Treasury Funding Initiative 10: LSM including UTXO-HD):
    • Changed the default snapshot policy. The node now takes a snapshot every 40*k slots, with no offset. On mainnet that is one snapshot a day. One snapshot in five lands on an epoch boundary. This keeps the node aligned with Mithril (#2194).
  • Documentation and tooling (Treasury Funding Initiative 17: Maintenance and Support):
    • Wrote a new page on hard forks and node-to-node versioning. A hard fork does not need a new node-to-node protocol version. Each block carries its own era tag. The protocol version holds back an era that is not yet active, not the wire format (#2117).
    • Corrected the db-analyser timing documentation and added two columns to its CSV output. A script that reads the CSV by column position needs an update (#2186).