The team works on applied research and consulting in formal methods that is directly applicable to evidence based engineering in Core Tech and beyond.

High level summary​

The team is currently formalising mini protocols and testing the performance analysis tool

Details​

• drafting processs calculus semantics of mini protocol programs

• testing the new performance modelling tool

• further work on specification of mini protocols

• extension of mini protocol framework to support communication of programs with local environments via synchronous channels

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra team mainly focused on having a working new reliability network layer; and specified its expected behavior in a new ADR.

They also revisited the security policy and vulnerability disclosure policy on how to handle security vulnerability within Hydra, and in particular how to handle so-called "Silent fixes".

What did the team achieve this week​

• Updated security policy and vulnerability disclosure policy #1088
• Adr/network reliability #1082

What are the goals of next week​

• Introduce reliability network layer [#1074] (https://github.com/input-output-hk/hydra/pull/1074)
• Refactor the vCommit validator in Aiken #1072

High level summary​

Few important Conway related features were completed in this two week period:

• Constitutional Committee was the last missing Conway related entity that has now been fully implemented.
• Treasury withdrawals governance actions have been fixed and now behave as expected.
• Current treasury amount supplied in the transaction is now enforced by the rules.
• DRep's expiry is prevented by delaying the expiry for all DReps whenever there are no proposals to vote on.
• Semantics of how CostModels are updated with Protocol Parameters have been changed to allow for individual Plutus language version updates, rather than requiring a complete replacement of all CostModels

Besides the new features there were also important performance and testing improvements:

• In particular stake distribution computation and native script handling received some optimizations.
• New testing DSL has been implemented that drastically simplifies writing unit tests for ledger rules.
• Integration tests and benchmarks are now possible for Conway era because of the overhaul of functionality for initial funds and staking injection whenever node starts up in Conway, while bypassing all previous eras.

Low level summary​

Conway era​

• pull-3729 - DRep expiry update after a contiguous set of epochs with no proposals to vote on
• pull-3739 - Rename some PParams to be consistent with Agda specification
• pull-3743 - Move DRepDistr from VState to ConwayGovState
• pull-3746 - Implement tcTranslationContextL for Shelley
• pull-3737 - Implement EraTransition
• pull-3749 - Add predicate failure: current treasury value mismatch in LEDGER
• pull-3748 - Apply enacted treasury withdrawals
• pull-3745 - Constitutional Committee Ratification
• pull-3763 - Plutus interface improvements
• pull-3771 - Changed how costmodel updates are applied
• pull-3766 - Prevent updating protocol version with PParamUpdate

Performance​

• pull-3765 - Improve native script handling
• pull-3747 - Use (CompactForm Coin) in IncrementalStake, DRepDistr (and other places) instead of Coin
• pull-3758 - Cardano-Perf regression: UMap.size regression fix
• pull-3754 - Use Alonzo-style TxOut encoder when possible

Releasing​

• pull-3742 - Update fourmolu, ghcid and hls. Update haskellNix and iohkNix flakes
• pull-3744 - Changelog 8.4
• pull-3752 - Patch release of cardano ledger conway 1.8.1.0
• pull-3753 - Minor cleanup and changelog entries
• pull-3760 - Fixup issues for release
• pull-3764 - Bump plutus deps to 1.13

Testing​

• pull-3734 - Removed Shaped instance for Rep
• pull-3735 - Simplify the implementations of hasOrd and hasEq
• pull-3728 - STS tests based on constraints
• pull-3714 - Implement the remaining upgradable families
• pull-3733 - Add some unit tests for Conway features
• pull-3762 - Update CDDL for praos headers.

High level summary​

The SRE team continues work on cardano environment improvements and general environment maintenance.

Some notable recent changes, updates or improvements include:

• Sanchonet environment was re-spun starting from slot 7171200 and updated to cardano-node 8.4.0-pre.
• The use of cardano-node docker hub will be deprecated in preference of GHCR

Lower level summary​

Capkgs​

• Refactor parsing scripts, add github action automation, various bugfixes and cleanup: capkgs-compare

Cardano-parts​

• Updates secrets layout scheme, adds sops enc/dec for jobs, adds cloud monitoring profile, updates flake templates and other improvements/fixes: cardano-parts-pull-8

Cardano-playground​

• Updates for new cardano-parts secrets handling and layout, TF workspace handling, group multivalue DNS support, grafana cloud monitoring and other improvements: cardano-playground

Cardano-world​

• Update sanchonet network to cardano-node 8.4.0: cardano-world-compare
• Rotate KES on shelley-qa: cardano-world-commit

High level overview​

The Mithril team has released a new distribution 2337.0, which includes the following enhancements: support for zstandard compression of snapshot archives, support for the Cardano node version in snapshot metadata, and support for recording snapshot download statistics in the aggregator.

They also completed the refactoring and standardization of the errors in the Mithril nodes and published an Architectural decision record on the documentation website. Additionally, they kept working on adding Cloudflare protection to the infrastructure.

Finally, the team fixed a performance issue on the stress test tool for the aggregator and made some improvements to the documentation for SPOs.

Low level overview​

• Completed the issue Release new 2337 distribution #1219
• Completed the issue Errors refactoring #798
• Completed the issue Client traffic creates performance bottleneck in aggregator #1207
• Completed the issue Record statistics about the downloaded snapshot in the aggregator #1127
• Completed the issue Create a SPO checklist for KES keys update #1267
• Worked on the issue Spike: Run client in browser WASM PoC #1254
• Worked on the issue Benchmark aggregator performances #1220
• Worked on the issue Activate Cloudflare protection of infrastructure #1230