Besu : 2019-10-29 Contributor Call

Recording of Call

1.4 release planning

• discussed release cadence
  • AR - Danno add wiki page for this
  • Discussed breaking changes in release not in CD releases, do breaks at quarterly releases
    • Example: Disallowing comments in genesis.json
    • Example: dropping support for Java 8
• 1.4 aimed release for end of Feb, 26/27
  • RC 12/13 Feb
• Call from community about desired features
  • PegaSys contributions
    • End to End TLS between external programs
      • JSON-RPC for EthSigner
      • ? for Orion
    • More Tracing APIs
      • More like Parity's style, currently have Geth's style.
    • TPS/QPS performance improvements
      • TPS focus for private networks
      • QPS focus for public networks (like mainnet
    • Support Berlin HF if Berlin HF happens (maybe)
      • This is driven by AllCoreDevs
    • Node multi-tenancy (conceptual, design TBD)
      • One node isolating data for multiple consortial clients
  • ETC Support
    • Targeting mid-November, shipping in 1.3 CD releases
  • Privacy Group Management
    • Needs to be able to add precompiles via plugins
  • Any contributions as they roll in
• ETC update
  • All ETC hard forks implemented 
  • Syncing up to block 4 million
  • Had a bottleneck at 1.5mil
    • Likely because of shared network ID
    • May be able to write an ETC peer validator
  • Bob Noted PRs for
    • Switching to fast sync by default
      • Discussing on for public networks, off for private networks by default.
      • Interacts with pruning feature
    • Stratum mining from Antoine from Whiteblock
• CI/CD
  • Josh isn't here,
  • Brian discussed moving to CircleCI vs Azure Pipelines vs GitLabCI
    • Brian wants convergence to one CI provider, but there is no formal policy prohibiting it.
• Grid Demo (not HL Grid, the EF project)
  • Deferred to a future meeting

Open discussion

• PegaSys posts bounties, keep an eye on Gitcoin
• EthWaterloo/EthDenver/EthCC
  • Waterloo - Nov 8-10
  • Denver - Feb 15-17
  • EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference Paris France) - March 3-5 - Bob Summerwill talking
• Status on Trie Optimization
  • Not in the roadmap currently.
  • Danno is investigating alternate storage engines, HaloDB, etc.
• Discussion about optimizations and JVMs
• Hyperledger Caliper
  • Supports Besu in 0.2
  • First Cross HLP contributions