Lotus Newsletter

[jennijuju]

See what is Lotus here

📣Lotus Announcements: https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/discussions/categories/announcements
🗣Lotus Discussion: https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/discussions
🎫Lotus Issue: https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/issues

Moderator for this discussion:
@jennijuju

[jennijuju]

🗞2021-02-17

What happened?

A lotus v1.5.0 mandatory upgrade release was planned back in mid-January to include many storage deal making and miner sealing improvements and bug fixes. The release also integrated spec-actor v3. The most significant changes in the v3 actor target to reduce the gas consumption of proof validation and state manipulation by the development of two FIPs: the FIP-007 H/AMT-v3 and FIP-0010 off-chain Window PoSt verification. The lotus maintainer team proposed an upgrade timeline and started a discussion to receive community feedback. Testing was done on the calibration testnet and two bugs were identified. Due to the tight timeline, a third testnet upgrade epoch was proposed within a very short notice and unfortunately there wasn't enough power made the upgrade. We also received a lot of requests from the Chinese community about avoiding having a mandatory release within CNY holiday and we definitely want our community to spend valuable time with their families during this special time, therefore, we eventually decided to temporarily retire the calibration net and postpone the upgrade release.

That being said, MANY amazing new features and improvements were still awaiting in lotus, therefore, we just put out the v1.4.2 optional release! The proofs team has been putting their hands down on fixing the GPU stuck acquiring priority lock bug that is causing winning and window PoSt hang in certain circumstances. Please see the details here and post any questions in the v1.4.2 discussion!

Whats Next?

The lotus team is working on designing a sustainable and mainnet-like testnet with an improved faucet and cryptoecon parameters and hopefully have a long-living testnet running in Q1. The network v10 mandatory upgrade is planned in early March. See here for the detailed lotus v1.5.0 release and network upgrade timeline. Leave a comment in the lotus v1.5.0 discussion if you have any questions!

Crypto Compute Lab is actively auditing and improving unsealing performance to make large file retrieval more user friendly. Some devs from proofs teams have been working with Supranational and community member on a 4x faster proving improvements on both Window PoSt and PoRep . The team is also looking into proofs aggregation that allows compressing many snark proofs into a single blob which will make verification way faster than doing them individually.

The Cryptonet team has been digging into the potential solutions to reduce the congestions and they just proposed an FIP for adding ProveCommitSectorAggregated method as the first step towards that! Join the discussion if you have any questions, suggestions or feedbacks.

Contribute

Lotus and rust-fil-proofs are universally open-sourced projects and welcome OSS contributions of all kinds: code, docs, and more, please review the contribution guidelines of each repo to make the work more efficent. Lotus and proofs' GitHub discussion forums are also both enabled for general questions, brainstorming ideas with the community or seeking helo for troubleshooting!