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Release Notes for Bitcoin Cash Node version 28.0.1

Bitcoin Cash Node version 28.0.1 is now available from:

https://bitcoincashnode.org

Overview

This release of Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) is a patch release. It includes various corrections and improvements, most notably a performance improvement for large block processing, which should benefit non-mining and mining nodes alike.

Usage recommendations

Users who are running v28.0.0 or older are encouraged to upgrade to v28.0.1.

Network changes

None

Added functionality

None

Deprecated functionality

None

Modified functionality

  • The peer-to-peer network's block propagation logic has been improved to allow for lower-latency block propagation. In particular, block downloads now request the latest block from up to 3 peers simultaneously so that the node has a better chance of receiving the latest block as quickly as possible.
  • The ABLA startup checks have been simplified and reduced to be simpler and faster. This should improve Bitcoin Cash Node startup times (in particular if running on an HDD-based system). To enable the old more thorough ABLA checks at app startup, start the node with the -check-abla option.

Removed functionality

None

New RPC methods

None

User interface changes

  • The getpeerinfo RPC returns two new boolean fields, bip152_hb_to and bip152_hb_from, that respectively indicate whether we selected a peer to be in compact blocks high-bandwidth mode or whether a peer selected us as a compact blocks high-bandwidth peer. High-bandwidth peers send new block announcements via a cmpctblock message rather than the usual inv/headers announcements. See BIP 152 for more details.
  • The getnetworkinfo RPC method results now include two new keys: connections_in and connections_out. These correspond to the current number of active inbound and outbound peer-to-peer connections, respectively.

Regressions

Bitcoin Cash Node 28.0.1 does not introduce any known regressions as compared to 28.0.0.

Limitations

The following are limitations in this release of which users should be aware:

  1. CashToken support is low-level at this stage. The wallet application does not yet keep track of the user's tokens. Tokens are only manageable via RPC commands currently. They only persist through the UTXO database and block database at this point. There are existing RPC commands to list and filter for tokens in the UTXO set. RPC raw transaction handling commands have been extended to allow creation (and sending) of token transactions. Interested users are advised to consult the functional test in test/functional/bchn-rpc-tokens.py for examples on token transaction construction and listing. Future releases will aim to extend the RPC API with more convenient ways to create and spend tokens, as well as upgrading the wallet storage and indexing subsystems to persistently store data about tokens of interest to the user. Later we expect to add GUI wallet management of Cash Tokens.

  2. Transactions with SIGHASH_UTXO are not covered by DSProofs at present.

  3. P2SH-32 is not used by default in the wallet (regular P2SH-20 remains the default wherever P2SH is treated).

  4. The markup of Double Spend Proof events in the wallet does not survive a restart of the wallet, as the information is not persisted to the wallet.

  5. The ABLA algorithm for BCH is currently temporarily set to cap the max block size at 2GB. This is due to limitations in the p2p protocol (as well as the block data file format in BCHN).

Known Issues

Some issues could not be closed in time for release, but we are tracking all of them on our GitLab repository.

  • The minimum macOS version is 10.14 (Mojave). Earlier macOS versions are no longer supported.

  • Windows users are recommended not to run multiple instances of bitcoin-qt or bitcoind on the same machine if the wallet feature is enabled. There is risk of data corruption if instances are configured to use the same wallet folder.

  • Some users have encountered unit tests failures when running in WSL environments (e.g. WSL/Ubuntu). At this time, WSL is not considered a supported environment for the software. This may change in future. It has been reported that using WSL2 improves the issue.

  • doc/dependencies.md needs revision (Issue #65).

  • For users running from sources built with BerkeleyDB releases newer than the 5.3 which is used in this release, please take into consideration the database format compatibility issues described in Issue #34. When building from source it is recommended to use BerkeleyDB 5.3 as this avoids wallet database incompatibility issues with the official release.

  • The test_bitcoin-qt test executable fails on Linux Mint 20 (see Issue #144). This does not otherwise appear to impact the functioning of the BCHN software on that platform.

  • With a certain combination of build flags that included disabling the QR code library, a build failure was observed where an erroneous linking against the QR code library (not present) was attempted (Issue #138).

  • Possible out-of-memory error when starting bitcoind with high excessiveblocksize value (Issue #156)

  • A problem was observed on scalenet where nodes would sometimes hang for around 10 minutes, accepting RPC connections but not responding to them (see #210).

  • Startup and shutdown time of nodes on scalenet can be long (see Issue #313).

  • Race condition in one of the p2p_invalid_messages.py tests (see Issue #409).

  • Occasional failure in bchn-txbroadcastinterval.py (see Issue #403).

  • wallet_keypool.py test failure when run as part of suite on certain many-core platforms (see Issue #380).

  • Spurious 'insufficient funds' failure during p2p_stresstest.py benchmark (see Issue #377).

  • If compiling from source, secp256k1 now no longer works with latest openssl3.x series. There are workarounds (see Issue #364).

  • Spurious AssertionError: Mempool sync timed out in several tests (see Issue #357).

  • For some platforms, there may be a need to install additional libraries in order to build from source (see Issue #431 and discussion in MR 1523).

  • More TorV3 static seeds may be needed to get -onlynet=onion working (see Issue #429).

  • Memory usage can be very high if repeatedly doing RPC getblock with verbose=2 on a hash of known big blocks (see Issue #466).

  • A GUI crash failure was observed when attempting to encrypt a large imported wallet (see Issue #490).

  • The 'wallet_multiwallet' functional test fails on latest Arch Linux due to a change in semantics in a dependency (see Issue #505). This is not expected to impact functionality otherwise, only a particular edge case of the test.

  • The 'p2p_extversion' functional test is sensitive to timing issues when run at high load (see Issue #501).

Changes since Bitcoin Cash Node 28.0.0

New documents

None

Removed documents

None

Notable commits grouped by functionality

Security or consensus relevant fixes

  • 5ac80029444ad7c065206903064c35f88d056a22 net: Fix potential for UB in CNode::ReceiveMsgBytes
  • 2b92f731ff52d61379047ec21868adc69ea15f42 mempool: Fix potential for bug in mempool removeForBlock()

Interfaces / RPC

  • 2aaadb60b8e31694be50b273cfc3c680dace5096 net, rpc: expose high bandwidth mode state via getpeerinfo

Features in internal development: support for UTXO commitments

None

Data directory changes

None

Performance optimizations

  • 6961e643de353b94823e834e1c7046ffe888150a net: Avoid excess CPU usage by msghand thread; fix "early wake up" logic
  • fa0d374801ad0001a132569bed047fdb95e19516 Improve DisconnectedBlockTransactions::addForBlock performance
  • ecd1392cfeeaffc87d66179e91e902daae0abffa ABLA: Improve performance of app init, turn off slower checks by default
  • ac22ffd9b05ef592cf044f8decc91cafd1191de9 [net] Parallel compact block downloads

GUI

None

Code quality

  • 70b94b05b50dc40146587ae257d0bab3e84672d1 [net processing] Tidy up sendcmpct processing

Documentation updates

  • 4a8036c008c677ef4054b0b257c6a2056918eb7b Update Ubuntu and Debian build guide

Build / general

None

Build / Linux

None

Build / Windows

None

Build / MacOSX

None

Tests / test framework

  • ae96a7f02927ae0954ce5456872f63362cfbf323 Improvements to test bchn-txbroadcastinterval.py
  • 3e6cff52473acd41ea2213dc8d627375646ed6a0 [tests] Allow outbound connections in functional tests.
  • c2f4061ec7d40d2f9ab4e62dd7b56b067d090581 util: Add CHECK_NONFATAL and use it in src/rpc
  • 1d5a02e8c8de06fb57243a4260668c3ba8b890b6 Added partial backport of core header/cpp file "util/check.*"
  • 124e41bb791a6b95db810ca39ea15d386a1eacd6 Add tests for parallel compact block downloads

Benchmarks

None

Seeds / seeder software

None

Maintainer tools

None

Infrastructure

None

Cleanup

  • b18fb57c2eb72e628ff8270964c4b53c927efc5a [qa] Bump version to 28.0.1, rotate release notes
  • a69c5c6c667c2d1b006422ac57a0fd84f990a4e6 net: Remove extraneous/bad log line from net_processing.cpp
  • e887c38afe32abff1a8befececf41d4f16f22524 Update DisconnectedBlockTransactions::addForBlock to use CHECK_NONFATAL rather than assert()

Continuous Integration (GitLab CI)

None

Compatibility

None

Backports

  • 3e6cff52473acd41ea2213dc8d627375646ed6a0 [tests] Allow outbound connections in functional tests.
  • c2f4061ec7d40d2f9ab4e62dd7b56b067d090581 util: Add CHECK_NONFATAL and use it in src/rpc
  • 1d5a02e8c8de06fb57243a4260668c3ba8b890b6 Added partial backport of core header/cpp file "util/check.*"
  • 2aaadb60b8e31694be50b273cfc3c680dace5096 net, rpc: expose high bandwidth mode state via getpeerinfo
  • 70b94b05b50dc40146587ae257d0bab3e84672d1 [net processing] Tidy up sendcmpct processing
  • ac22ffd9b05ef592cf044f8decc91cafd1191de9 [net] Parallel compact block downloads
  • 124e41bb791a6b95db810ca39ea15d386a1eacd6 Add tests for parallel compact block downloads