CHANGELOG.md

CHANGELOG

Unreleased

July 1, 2024

This is a major release of CometBFT that includes several substantial changes that aim to reduce bandwidth consumption, enable modularity, improve integrators' experience and increase the velocity of the CometBFT development team, including:

1. Validators now proactively communicate the block parts they already have so others do not resend them, reducing amplification in the network and reducing bandwidth consumption.
2. An experimental feature in the mempool that allows limiting the number of peers to which transactions are forwarded, allowing operators to optimize gossip-related bandwidth consumption further.
3. An opt-in nop mempool, which allows application developers to turn off all mempool-related functionality in Comet such that they can build their own transaction dissemination mechanism, for example a standalone mempool-like process that can be scaled independently of the consensus engine/application. This requires application developers to implement their own gossip/networking mechanisms. See ADR 111 for details.
4. The first officially supported release of the data companion API.
5. Versioning of both the Protobuf definitions and RPC. By versioning our APIs, we aim to provide a level of commitment to API stability while simultaneously affording ourselves the ability to roll out substantial changes in non-breaking releases of CometBFT. See ADR 103 and ADR 107.
6. Moving many Go packages that are currently publicly accessible into the internal directory such that the team can roll out substantial changes in future without needing to worry about causing breakages in users' codebases. The massive surface area of previous versions has in the past significantly hampered the team's ability to roll out impactful new changes to users, as previously such changes required a new breaking release (which currently takes 6 to 12 months to reach production use for many users). See ADR 109 for more details.
7. Proposer-Based Timestamps (PBTS) support. PBTS is a Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm used by CometBFT for computing block times. When activated on a chain, it replaces the pre-existing BFT-time algorithm. See spec doc for PBTS.

None of these changes are state machine-breaking for CometBFT-based networks, but could be breaking for some users who depend on the Protobuf definitions type URLs. See the upgrading guidelines and specific changes below for more details.

NB: This version is still a release candidate, which means that API-breaking changes, although very unlikely, might still be introduced before the final release. See RELEASES.md for more information on the stability guarantees we provide for pre-releases.

BREAKING CHANGES

• [abci/types] Rename UpdateValidator to NewValidatorUpdate, remove Ed25519ValidatorUpdate (#2843)
• [abci/client] Deprecate SetResponseCallback(cb Callback) in the Client interface as it is no longer used. (#3084)
• [abci/types] Replace ValidatorUpdate.PubKey with PubKeyType and PubKeyBytes to allow applications to avoid implementing PubKey interface. (#2843)
• [abci] Changed the proto-derived enum type and constant aliases to the buf-recommended naming conventions adopted in the abci/v1 proto package. For example, ResponseProcessProposal_ACCEPT is renamed to PROCESS_PROPOSAL_STATUS_ACCEPT (#736).
• [abci] The Type enum field is now required to be set to a value other than the default CHECK_TX_TYPE_UNKNOWN for a valid CheckTxRequest (#736).
• [abci] Deprecates ABCIParams field of ConsensusParam and introduces replacement in FeatureParams to enable Vote Extensions. (#2322)
• [abci] Renamed the alias types for gRPC requests, responses, and service instances to follow the naming changes in the proto-derived api/cometbft/abci/v1 package (#1533):
  • The prefixed naming pattern RequestFoo, ReponseFoo changed to suffixed FooRequest, FooResponse.
  • Each method gets its own unique request and response type to allow for independent evolution with backward compatibility.
  • ABCIClient renamed to ABCIServiceClient.
  • ABCIServer renamed to ABCIServiceServer.
• [blocksync] Move to internal (#1485)
• [cmd] Remove replay and replay-console subcommands and corresponding consensus file replay code, such as consensus.RunReplayFile, and consensus.State.ReplayFile (#1170)
• [comet] Version variables, in version/version.go, have been renamed to reflect the CometBFT rebranding. (#1621)
• [config] Merge timeout_prevote and timeout_precommit, timeout_prevote_delta and timeout_precommit_delta into timeout_round and timeout_round_delta accordingly (#2895)
• [config] Remove cleveldb and boltdb (#2786)
• [config] Remove skip_timeout_commit in favor of timeout_commit=0 (#2892)
• [consensus] Move to internal (#1485)
• [consensus] Handshaker.Handshake now requires context.Context (#857)
• [node] NewNode now requires context.Context as the first parameter (#857)
• [crypto/merkle] The public Proof.ComputeRootHash function has been deleted. (#558)
• [crypto] Remove unnecessary Sha256 wrapper (#3248)
• [crypto] Remove unnecessary xchacha20 and xsalsa20 implementations (#3347)
• [evidence] Move to internal (#1485)
• [go/runtime] Bump minimum Go version to v1.22 (#2725)
• [inspect] Move to internal (#1485)
• [internal/state] Moved function MedianTime to package types, and made it a method of Commit so it can be used by external packages. (#2397)
• [libs/async] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/autofile] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/bits] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/clist] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/cmap] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/events] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/fail] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/flowrate] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/net] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/os] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/progressbar] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/rand] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/strings] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/tempfile] Move to internal (#1485)
• [libs/timer] Move to internal (#1485)
• [mempool] Add to the Mempool interface a new method PreUpdate(). This method should be called before acquiring the mempool lock, to signal that a new update is coming. Also add to ErrMempoolIsFull a new field RecheckFull. (#3314)
• [mempool] Change the signature of CheckTx in the Mempool interface to CheckTx(tx types.Tx, sender p2p.ID) (*abcicli.ReqRes, error). (#1010, #3084)
• [mempool] Remove mempoolIDs for internally storing peer ids as p2p.ID instead of uint16. (#1146)
• [node] Change the signature of GenesisDocProvider to return the checksum of JSON content alongside the parsed genesis data (#1287).
• [node] Go-API breaking: Change the signature of LoadStateFromDBOrGenesisDocProvider to accept an optional operator provided hash of the genesis file (#1324).
• [p2p] Remove p2p_peer_send_bytes_total and p2p_peer_receive_bytes_total metrics as they are costly to track, and not that informative in debugging (#3184)
• [p2p] Rename IPeerSet#List to Copy, add Random, ForEach methods. Rename PeerSet#List to Copy, add Random, ForEach methods. (#2246)
• [privval] allow privval to sign arbitrary bytes (#2692)
• [proto/api] Made /api a standalone Go module with its own go.mod (#1561)
• [proto/privval] Replace pub_key with pub_key_type and pub_key_bytes in PubKeyResponse (#2878)
• [proto/types] Deprecate pub_key in favor of pub_key_type and pub_key_bytes in Validator (#2878)
• [proto] Remove abci.ValidatorUpdate.pub_key, add pub_key_type and pub_key_bytes (#2843)
• [proto] Remove stateful block data retrieval methods from the data companion gRPC API as per RFC 106 (#2230):
  • GetLatest from cometbft.services.block.v1.BlockService;
  • GetLatestBlockResults from cometbft.services.block_results.v1.BlockResultsService.
• [rpc/grpc] Remove support for stateful block data retrieval methods from the data companion APIs as per RFC 106
  • GetLatestBlock method removed from the BlockServiceClient interface.
  • GetLatestBlockResults method removed from the BlockResultServiceClient interface.
  • GetLatest endpoint is no longer served by BlockServiceServer instances.
  • GetLatestBlockResults endpoint is no longer served by BlockResultServiceServer instances.
• [proto] Renamed the packages from tendermint.* to cometbft.* and introduced versioned packages to distinguish between proto definitions released in 0.34.x, 0.37.x, 0.38.x, and 1.x versions. Prior to the 1.0 release, the versioned packages are suffixed with .v1beta1, .v1beta2, and so on; all definitions describing the protocols as per the 1.0.0 release are in packages suffixed with .v1. Relocated generated Go code into a new api folder and changed the import paths accordingly. (#495, #1504)
• [proto] The names in the cometbft.abci.v1 versioned proto package are changed to satisfy the buf guidelines (#736, #1504, #1530):
  • Names of request and response types used in gRPC changed by making Request/Response the suffix instead of the prefix, e.g. RequestCheckTx ⭢ CheckTxRequest.
  • The Request and Response multiplex messages are redefined accordingly.
  • CheckTxType values renamed with the CHECK_TX_TYPE_ prefix.
  • MisbehaviorType values renamed with the MISBEHAVIOR_TYPE_ prefix.
  • Result enum formerly nested in ResponseOfferSnapshot replaced with the package-level OfferSnapshotResult, its values named with the OFFER_SNAPSHOT_RESULT_ prefix.
  • Result enum formerly nested in ResponseApplyShapshotChunk replaced with the package-level ApplySnapshotChunkResult, its values named with the APPLY_SNAPSHOT_CHUNK_RESULT_ prefix.
  • Status enum formerly nested in ResponseProcessProposal replaced with the package-level ProcessProposalStatus, its values named with the PROCESS_PROPOSAL_STATUS_ prefix.
  • Status enum formerly nested in ResponseVerifyVoteExtension replaced with the package-level VerifyVoteExtensionStatus, its values named with the VERIFY_VOTE_EXTENSION_STATUS_ prefix.
  • New definition of Misbehavior using the changed MisbehaviorType.
  • The gRPC service is renamed ABCIService and defined using the types listed above.
• [proto] In the cometbft.state.v1 package, the definition for ABCIResponsesInfo is changed, renaming response_finalize_block field to finalize_block.
• [proxy] Expand ClientCreator interface to allow for per-"connection" control of client creation (#1141)
• [rpc/client] Hard-code the /websocket endpoint path such that it is no longer configurable, removing the related client constructor parameter (#1412)
• [rpc/grpc] Remove the deprecated gRPC broadcast API (#650)
• [rpc] The endpoints broadcast_tx_* now return an error when the node is performing block sync or state sync. (#785)
• [mempool] When the node is performing block sync or state sync, the mempool reactor now discards incoming transactions from peers, and does not propagate transactions to peers. (#785)
• [state/indexer/block] BlockIndexer now has additional method Prune, GetRetainHeight, SetRetainHeight (#1176)
• [state/txindex] TxIndexer now has additional methods: Prune, GetRetainHeight, SetRetainHeight (#1176)
• [state/store] go-API breaking change in PruneABCIResponses: added parameter to force compaction. (#1972)
• [state/store] go-API breaking change in PruneStates: added parameter to pass the number of pruned states and return pruned entries in current pruning iteration. (#1972)
• [state] The state.Store interface has been expanded to accommodate the data pull companion API of ADR 101 (#1096)
• [store] Make the LoadBlock method also return block metadata (#1556)
• [version] Bumped the P2P version from 8 to 9, as this release contains new P2P messages. (#1411)

BUG FIXES

• [bits] prevent BitArray.UnmarshalJSON from crashing on 0 bits (#2774)
• [blocksync] Wait for poolRoutine to stop in (*Reactor).OnStop (#1879)
• [consensus] Consensus now prevotes nil when the proposed value does not match the value the local validator has locked on (#1203)
• [consensus] Fix a race condition in the consensus timeout ticker. Race is caused by two timeouts being scheduled at the same time. (#3092)
• [consensus] Fix for Security Advisory ASA-2024-001: Validation of VoteExtensionsEnableHeight can cause chain halt (ASA-2024-001)
• [consensus] Remove logic to unlock block on +2/3 prevote for nil (#1175: @BrendanChou)
• [crypto] SupportsBatchVerifier returns false if public key is nil instead of dereferencing nil. (#1825)
• [evidence] When VerifyCommitLight & VerifyCommitLightTrusting are called as part of evidence verification, all signatures present in the evidence must be verified (#1749)
• [log] Fix panic when log with nil val which is a pointer who implements fmt.Stringer interface (#3145)
• [mempool] Fix data race when rechecking with async ABCI client (#1827)
• [mempool] Fix data races in CListMempool by making atomic the types of height, txsBytes, and notifiedTxsAvailable. (#642)
• [mempool] Panic when a CheckTx request to the app returns an error (#2225)
• [mempool] The calculation method of tx size returned by calling proxyapp should be consistent with that of mempool (#1687)
• [p2p/pex] Gracefully shutdown Reactor (#2010)
• [privval] Retry accepting a connection (#2047)
• [rpc] Fix nil pointer error in /tx and /tx_search when block is absent (#3352)
• [state/indexer] Respect both height params while querying for events (#1529)
• [state/pruning] When no blocks are pruned, do not attempt to prune statestore (#1616)
• [state] Fix rollback to a specific height (#2136)
• [types] Do not batch verify a commit if the validator set keys have different types. (#3195

DEPENDENCIES

• Bump api to v1.0.0-rc.1 for v1.0.0 Release Candidate 1 (#3191)
• Bump cometbft-db to v0.9.0, providing support for RocksDB v8 (#1725)

FEATURES

• [config] Add pebbledb. To use, build with pebbledb tag (go build -tags pebbledb) (#2132)
• [config] Add [grpc.block_results_service] gRPC configuration BlockResultsService (#1095)
• [config] Add [grpc.block_service] section to configure gRPC BlockService (#1094)
• [config] Add configuration parameters to tweak forced compaction. (#1972)
• [config] Added [grpc.version_service] section for configuring the gRPC version service. (#816)
• [config] Added [grpc] section to configure the gRPC server. (#816)
• [config] Added [storage.experimental_db_key_layout] storage parameter, set to "v2" for order preserving representation (#2327)
• [config] Move timeout_commit into the ABCI FinalizeBlockResponse (#2655)
• [config] Removed unused [mempool.max_batch_bytes] mempool parameter. (#2056)
• [config] Update the default value of mempool.max_txs_bytes to 64 MiB. (#2756)
• [consensus] Make mempool updates asynchronous from consensus Commit's, reducing latency for reaching consensus timeouts. (#3008)
• [consensus] Update block validation to no longer require the block timestamp to be the median of the timestamps of the previous commit. (@anca) (tendermint/tendermint#7382)
• [consensus] Update proposal validation logic to Prevote nil if a proposal does not meet the conditions for Timeliness per the proposer-based timestamp specification. (@anca) (tendermint/tendermint#7415)
• [consensus] Update the proposal logic per the Propose-based timestamps specification so that the proposer will wait for the previous block time to occur before proposing the next block. (@williambanfield) (tendermint/tendermint#7376)
• [consensus] Use the proposed block timestamp as the proposal timestamp. Update the block validation logic to ensure that the proposed block's timestamp matches the timestamp in the proposal message. (@williambanfield) (tendermint/tendermint#7391)
• [consensus] Use the proposer timestamp for the first height instead of the genesis time. Chains will still start consensus at the genesis time. (@anca) (tendermint/tendermint#7711)
• [consensus] add a new synchrony field to the ConsensusParameter struct for controlling the parameters of the proposer-based timestamp algorithm. (@williambanfield) (tendermint/tendermint#7354)
• [crypto] Add support for BLS12-381 keys. Since the implementation needs cgo and brings in new dependencies, we use the bls12381 build flag to enable it (#2765)
• [docs] Add report on storage improvements and findings. (#2569)
• [e2e] Add block_max_bytes option to the manifest file. (#2362)
• [e2e] Add new --testnet-dir parameter to set a custom directory for the generated testnet files. (#2433)
• [evidence/store] Added support for a different DB key representation within the evidence store (#2327)
• [grpc] Add BlockResultsService with client to fetch BlockResults for a given height, or latest. (#1095)
• [grpc] Add BlockService with client to facilitate fetching of blocks and streaming of the latest committed block height (#1094)
• [light/store] Added support for a different DB key representation within the light block store (#2327)
• [mempool] Add nop mempool (#1643). If you want to use it, change mempool's type to nop:

      [mempool]

      # The type of mempool for this node to use.
      #
      # Possible types:
      # - "flood" : concurrent linked list mempool with flooding gossip protocol
      # (default)
      # - "nop"   : nop-mempool (short for no operation; the ABCI app is responsible
      # for storing, disseminating and proposing txs). "create_empty_blocks=false"
      # is not supported.
      type = "nop"

• [metrics] Add metric for mempool size in bytes SizeBytes. (#1512)
• [metrics] Add metrics to monitor pruning and current available data in stores: PruningServiceBlockRetainHeight, PruningServiceBlockResultsRetainHeight, ApplicationBlockRetainHeight, BlockStoreBaseHeight, ABCIResultsBaseHeight. (#1234)
• [metrics] Added metrics to monitor block store access. (#1974)
• [metrics] Added metrics to monitor state store access. (#1974)
• [proto] Add definitions and generated code for ADR-101 PruningService in the cometbft.services.pruning.v1 proto package (#1097)
• [rpc/grpc] Add privileged gRPC server and client facilities, in server/privileged and client/privileged packages respectively, to enable a separate API server within the node which serves trusted clients without authentication and should never be exposed to public internet (#1097)
• [rpc/grpc] Add a pruning service adding on the privileged gRPC server API to give an ADR-101 data companion control over block data retained by the node. The WithPruningService option method in server/privileged is provided to configure the pruning service (#1097)
• [rpc/grpc] Add PruningServiceClient interface for the gRPC client in client/privileged along with a configuration option to enable it (#1097)
• [config] Add [grpc.privileged] section to configure the privileged gRPC server for the node, and [grpc.privileged.pruning_service] section to control the pruning service (#1097)
• [proto] add syncing_to_height to FinalizeBlockRequest to let the ABCI app know if the node is syncing or not. (#1247)
• [rpc/grpc] Add gRPC client with support for version service (#816)
• [rpc/grpc] Add gRPC endpoint for pruning the block and transaction indexes (#1327)
• [rpc/grpc] Add gRPC server to the node, configurable via a new [grpc] section in the configuration file (#816)
• [rpc/grpc] Add gRPC version service to allow clients to establish the software and protocol versions of the node (#816)
• [rpc] Add unconfirmed_tx to support query mempool transaction by transaction hash. (#3079)
• [state] Add TxIndexer and BlockIndexer pruning metrics (#1334)
• [store] Added support for a different DB key representation to state and block store (#2327)
• [store] When pruning force compaction of the database. (#1972)
• [test] Added monitoring tools and dashboards for local testing with localnet. (#2107)

IMPROVEMENTS

• [abci/client] Add consensus-synchronized local client creator, which only imposes a mutex on the consensus "connection", leaving the concurrency of all other "connections" up to the application (#1141)
• [abci/client] Add fully unsynchronized local client creator, which imposes no mutexes on the application, leaving all handling of concurrency up to the application (#1141)
• [abci] Increase ABCI socket message size limit to 2GB (#1730: @troykessler)
• [blockstore] Remove a redundant Header.ValidateBasic call in LoadBlockMeta, 75% reducing this time. (#2964)
• [blockstore] Use LRU caches for LoadBlockPart. Make the LoadBlockPart and LoadBlockCommit APIs return mutative copies, that the caller is expected to not modify. This saves on memory copying. (#3342)
• [blockstore] Use LRU caches in blockstore, significiantly improving consensus gossip routine performance (#3003)
• [blocksync] Avoid double-calling types.BlockFromProto for performance reasons (#2016)
• [blocksync] Request a block from peer B if we are approaching pool's height (less than 50 blocks) and the current peer A is slow in sending us the block (#2475)
• [blocksync] Request the block N from peer B immediately after getting NoBlockResponse from peer A (#2475)
• [blocksync] Sort peers by download rate (the fastest peer is picked first) (#2475)
• [blocksync] make the max number of downloaded blocks dynamic. Previously it was a const 600. Now it's peersCount * maxPendingRequestsPerPeer (20) (#2467)
• [cli/node] The genesis hash provided with the --genesis-hash is now forwarded to the node, instead of reading the file. (#1324)
• [cmd] Add support for all key types in gen-validator command. Use --key-type= (or -k) to specify the key type (e.g., -k secp256k1). (#1757)
• [config] Added [storage.pruning] and [storage.pruning.data_companion] sections to facilitate background pruning and data companion (ADR 101) operations (#1096)
• [config] Added genesis_hash storage parameter, which when set it is checked on node startup (#1324)
• [config] Added recheck_timeout mempool parameter to set how much time to wait for recheck responses from the app (only applies to non-local ABCI clients). (#1827)
• [config] Use embed pkg for the default template (#3057)
• [consensus/state] Remove a redundant VerifyBlock call in FinalizeCommit (#2928)
• [consensus] Add chain_size_bytes metric for measuring the size of the blockchain in bytes (#2093)
• [consensus] Fix some reactor messages taking write locks instead of read locks. (#3159)
• [consensus] Improve performance of consensus metrics by lowering string operations (#3017)
• [consensus] Log vote validation failures at info level (#1022)
• [consensus] Lower the consensus blocking overhead of broadcasts from num_peers * process_creation_time to process_creation_time. (#3180)
• [consensus] Make Vote messages only take one peerstate mutex (#3156)
• [consensus] New metrics (counters) to track duplicate votes and block parts. (#896)
• [consensus] Optimize vote and block part gossip with new message HasProposalBlockPartMessage, which is similar to HasVoteMessage; and random sleep in the loop broadcasting those messages. The sleep can be configured with new config peer_gossip_intraloop_sleep_duration, which is set to 0 by default as this is experimental. Our scale tests show substantial bandwidth improvement with a value of 50 ms. (#904)
• [consensus] Reduce the default MaxBytes to 4MB and increase MaxGas to 10 million (#1518)
• [consensus] Reuse an internal buffer for block building to reduce memory allocation overhead. (#3162)
• [consensus] Use an independent rng for gossip threads, reducing mutex contention. (#3005)
• [consensus] When prevoting, avoid calling PropocessProposal when we know the proposal was already validated by correct nodes. (#1230)
• [crypto/merkle] faster calculation of hashes (#1921)
• [docs/references] Added ADR-102: RPC Companion. (#658)
• [docs] Merge configuration doc in explanation section with the config.toml document in references. (#2769)
• [e2e] Add manifest option VoteExtensionsUpdateHeight to test vote extension activation via InitChain and FinalizeBlock. Also, extend the manifest generator to produce different values of this new option (#2065)
• [e2e] Add manifest option load_max_txs to limit the number of transactions generated by the load command. (#2094)
• [e2e] Add new targets fast and clean to Makefile. (#2192)
• [e2e] Allow disabling the PEX reactor on all nodes in the testnet (#1579)
• [e2e] Allow latency emulation between nodes. (#1559)
• [e2e] Allow latency emulation between nodes. (#1560)
• [e2e] Introduce the possibility in the manifest for some nodes to run in a preconfigured clock skew. (#2453)
• [e2e] Log the number of transactions that were sent successfully or failed. (#2328)
• [e2e] add option to the 'runner logs' command to output logs separately. (#3353)
• [event-bus] Remove the debug logs in PublishEventTx, which were noticed production slowdowns. (#2911)
• [flowrate] Remove expensive time.Now() calls from flowrate calls. Changes clock updates to happen in a separate goroutine. (#3016)
• [indexer] Optimized the PSQL indexer (#2142) thanks to external contributor @k0marov !
• [internal/bits] 10x speedup and remove heap overhead of bitArray.PickRandom (used extensively in consensus gossip) (#2841).
• [internal/bits] 10x speedup creating initialized bitArrays, which speedsup extendedCommit.BitArray(). This is used in consensus vote gossip. (#2959).
• [jsonrpc] enable HTTP basic auth in websocket client (#2434)
• [libs/json] Lower the memory overhead of JSON encoding by using JSON encoders internally. (#2846)
• [light] Export light package errors (#1904) (contributes to #1140)
• [linting] Removed undesired linting from Makefile and added dependency check for codespell. (#1958)
• [mempool] Add a metric (a counter) to measure whether a tx was received more than once. (#634)
• [mempool] Add experimental feature to limit the number of persistent peers and non-persistent peers to which the node gossip transactions. (#1558) (#1584)
• [config] Add mempool parameters experimental_max_gossip_connections_to_persistent_peers and experimental_max_gossip_connections_to_non_persistent_peers for limiting the number of peers to which the node gossip transactions. (#1558) (#1584)
• [mempool] Before updating the mempool, consider it as full if rechecking is still in progress. This will stop accepting transactions in the mempool if the node can't keep up with re-CheckTx. (#3314)
• [node] On upgrade, after #1296, delete the genesis file existing in the DB. (#1297)
• [node] Remove genesis persistence in state db, replaced by a hash (#1017, #1295)
• [node] The node.Node struct now manages a state.Pruner service to facilitate background pruning (#1096)
• [node] export node package errors (#3056)
• [p2p/channel] Speedup ProtoIO writer creation time, and thereby speedup channel writing by 5%. (#2949)
• [p2p/conn] Minor speedup (3%) to connection.WritePacketMsgTo, by removing MinInt calls. (#2952)
• [p2p/conn] Speedup connection.WritePacketMsgTo, by reusing internal buffers rather than re-allocating. (#2986)
• [p2p] Export p2p package errors (#1901) (contributes to #1140)
• [p2p] Lower flush_throttle_timeout to 10ms (#2988)
• [p2p] Remove Switch#Broadcast unused return channel (#3182)
• [p2p] make PeerSet.Remove more efficient (Author: @odeke-em) #2246
• [privval] DO NOT require extension signature from privval if vote extensions are disabled. Remote signers can skip signing the extension if skip_extension_signing flag in SignVoteRequest is true. (#2496)
• [proto] Add skip_extension_signing field to the SignVoteRequest message in cometbft.privval.v1 (#2522). The cometbft.privval.v1beta2 package is added to capture the protocol as it was released in CometBFT 0.38.x (#2529).
• [protoio] Remove one allocation and new object call from ReadMsg, leading to a 4% p2p message reading performance gain. (#3018)
• [rpc] Add a configurable maximum batch size for RPC requests. (#2867).
• [rpc] Export RPC package errors (#2200) (contributes to #1140)
• [rpc] Export MakeHTTPDialer to allow HTTP client constructors more flexibility. (#1594)
• [rpc] Move the websockets info log for successful replies to debug. (#2788)
• [rpc] Support setting proxy from env to DefaultHttpClient. (#1900)
• [rpc] The RPC API is now versioned, with all existing endpoints accessible via /v1/* as well as /* (#1412)
• [rpc] Use default port for HTTP(S) URLs when there is no explicit port (#1903)
• [spec] Update Apalache type annotations in the light client spec (#955)
• [state/execution] Cache the block hash computation inside of the Block Type, so we only compute it once. (#2924)
• [state/indexer] Add transaction and block index pruning (#1176)
• [state/indexer] Fix txSearch performance issue (#2855)
• [state/indexer] Lower the heap allocation of transaction searches (#2839)
• [state] ABCI response pruning has been added for use by the data companion (#1096)
• [state] Block pruning has been moved from the block executor into a background process (#1096)
• [state] Save the state using a single DB batch (#1735)
• [state] avoid double-saving FinalizeBlockResponse for performance reasons (#2017)
• [store] Save block using a single DB batch if block is less than 640kB, otherwise each block part is saved individually (#1755)
• [types] Make a new method GetByAddressMut for ValSet, which does not copy the returned validator. (#3119)
• [types] Significantly speedup types.MakePartSet and types.AddPart, which are used in creating a block proposal (#3117)
• [types] Validate Validator#Address in ValidateBasic (#1715)

v0.38.0

September 12, 2023

This release includes the second part of ABCI++, called ABCI 2.0. ABCI 2.0 introduces ABCI methods ExtendVote and VerifyVoteExtension. These new methods allow the application to add data (opaque to CometBFT), called vote extensions to precommit votes sent by validators. These vote extensions are made available to the proposer(s) of the next height. Additionally, ABCI 2.0 coalesces BeginBlock, DeliverTx, and EndBlock into one method, FinalizeBlock, whose Request* and Response* data structures contain the sum of all data previously contained in the respective Request* and Response* data structures in BeginBlock, DeliverTx, and EndBlock. See the specification for more details on ABCI 2.0.

BREAKING CHANGES

• [abci] Introduce FinalizeBlock which condenses BeginBlock, DeliverTx and EndBlock into a single method call (#9468)
• [abci] Move app_hash parameter from Commit to FinalizeBlock (#8664)
• [config] Remove Version field from MempoolConfig. (#260)
• [crypto/merkle] Do not allow verification of Merkle Proofs against empty trees (nil root). Proof.ComputeRootHash now panics when it encounters an error, but Proof.Verify does not panic (#558)
• [inspect] Add a new inspect command for introspecting the state and block store of a crashed tendermint node. (#9655)
• [kvindexer] Added support for big integers and big floats in the kvindexer. Breaking changes: function Number in package libs/pubsub/query/syntax changed its return value. (#797)
• [mempool] Application can now set ConsensusParams.Block.MaxBytes to -1 to have visibility on all transactions in the mempool at PrepareProposal time. This means that the total size of transactions sent via RequestPrepareProposal might exceed RequestPrepareProposal.max_tx_bytes. If that is the case, the application MUST make sure that the total size of transactions returned in ResponsePrepareProposal.txs does not exceed RequestPrepareProposal.max_tx_bytes, otherwise CometBFT will panic. (#980)
• [mempool] Remove priority mempool. (#260)
• [metrics] Move state-syncing and block-syncing metrics to their respective packages. Move labels from block_syncing -> blocksync_syncing and state_syncing -> statesync_syncing (#9682)
• [node/state] Add Go API to bootstrap block store and state store to a height. Make sure block sync starts syncing from bootstrapped height. (#1057) (@yihuang)
• [state/store] Added Go functions to save height at which offline state sync is performed. (#1057) (@jmalicevic)
• [node] Move DBContext and DBProvider from the node package to the config package. (#9655)
• [node] Removed ConsensusState() accessor from Node struct - all access to consensus state should go via the reactor (#1120)
• [p2p] Remove UPnP functionality (#1113)
• [p2p] Remove unused p2p/trust package (#9625)
• [protobuf] Remove fields sender, priority, and mempool_error from ResponseCheckTx. (#260)
• [pubsub] Added support for big integers and big floats in the pubsub event query system. Breaking changes: function Number in package libs/pubsub/query/syntax changed its return value. (#797)
• [rpc] Remove global environment and replace with constructor (#9655)
• [rpc] Removed begin_block_events and end_block_events from BlockResultsResponse. The events are merged into one field called finalize_block_events. (#9427)
• [state/kvindexer] Remove the function type from the event key stored in the database. This should be breaking only for people who forked CometBFT and interact directly with the indexers kvstore. (#774)
• [state] Move pruneBlocks from node/state to state/execution. (#6541)
• [state] Signature of ExtendVote changed in BlockExecutor. It now includes the block whose precommit will be extended, an the state object. (#1270)

BUG FIXES

• [abci-cli] Fix broken abci-cli help command. (#9717)
• [abci] Restore the snake_case naming in JSON serialization of ExecTxResult (#855).
• [consensus] Avoid recursive call after rename to (*PeerState).MarshalJSON (#863)
• [consensus] Rename (*PeerState).ToJSON to MarshalJSON to fix a logging data race (#524)
• [consensus] Unexpected error conditions in ApplyBlock are non-recoverable, so ignoring the error and carrying on is a bug. We replaced a return that disregarded the error by a panic. (#496)
• [docker] Ensure Docker image uses consistent version of Go. (#9462)
• [kvindexer] Forward porting the fixes done to the kvindexer in 0.37 in PR #77 (#423)
• [light] Fixed an edge case where a light client would panic when attempting to query a node that (1) has started from a non-zero height and (2) does not yet have any data. The light client will now, correctly, not panic and keep the node in its list of providers in the same way it would if it queried a node starting from height zero that does not yet have data (#575)
• [mempool/clist_mempool] Prevent a transaction to appear twice in the mempool (#890: @otrack)

DEPRECATIONS

• [rpc/grpc] Mark the gRPC broadcast API as deprecated. It will be superseded by a broader API as part of #81 (#650)

FEATURES

• [abci] New ABCI methods VerifyVoteExtension and ExtendVote allow validators to validate the vote extension data attached to a pre-commit message and allow applications to let their validators do more than just validate within consensus (#9836)
• [node/state] Add Go API to bootstrap block store and state store to a height (#1057) (@yihuang)
• [proxy] Introduce NewConnSyncLocalClientCreator, which allows local ABCI clients to have the same concurrency model as remote clients (i.e. one mutex per client "connection", for each of the four ABCI "connections"). (tendermint/tendermint#9830 and #1145)
• [proxy] Introduce NewUnsyncLocalClientCreator, which allows local ABCI clients to have the same concurrency model as remote clients (i.e. one mutex per client "connection", for each of the four ABCI "connections"). (#9830)

IMPROVEMENTS

• [blocksync] Generate new metrics during BlockSync (#543)
• [crypto/merkle] Improve HashAlternatives performance (#6443)
• [crypto/merkle] Improve HashAlternatives performance (#6513)
• [jsonrpc/client] Improve the error message for client errors stemming from bad HTTP responses. (cometbft/cometbft#638)
• [mempool] Application can now set ConsensusParams.Block.MaxBytes to -1 to gain more control on the max size of transactions in a block. It also allows the application to have visibility on all transactions in the mempool at PrepareProposal time. (#980)
• [node] Close evidence.db OnStop (cometbft/cometbft#1210: @chillyvee)
• [node] Make handshake cancelable (cometbft/cometbft#857)
• [p2p/pex] Improve addrBook.hash performance (#6509)
• [pubsub/kvindexer] Numeric query conditions and event values are represented as big floats with default precision of 125. Integers are read as "big ints" and represented with as many bits as they need when converting to floats. (#797)
• [pubsub] Performance improvements for the event query API (#7319)
• [rpc] Remove response data from response failure logs in order to prevent large quantities of log data from being produced (#654)
• [state] Make logging block_app_hash and app_hash consistent by logging them both as hex. (#1264)

v0.37.0

March 6, 2023

This is the first CometBFT release with ABCI 1.0, which introduces the PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal methods, with the aim of expanding the range of use cases that application developers can address. This is the first change to ABCI towards ABCI++, and the full range of ABCI++ functionality will only become available in the next major release with ABCI 2.0. See the specification for more details.

In the v0.34.27 release, the CometBFT Go module is still github.com/tendermint/tendermint to facilitate ease of upgrading for users, but in this release we have changed this to github.com/cometbft/cometbft.

Please also see our upgrading guidelines for more details on upgrading from the v0.34 release series.

Also see our QA results for the v0.37 release.

We'd love your feedback on this release! Please reach out to us via one of our communication channels, such as GitHub Discussions, with any of your questions, comments and/or concerns.

See below for more details.

BREAKING CHANGES

• Bump minimum Go version to 1.20 (#385)
• Change spelling from British English to American. Rename Subscription.Cancelled() to Subscription.Canceled() in libs/pubsub (#9144)
• The TMHOME environment variable was renamed to CMTHOME, and all environment variables starting with TM_ are instead prefixed with CMT_ (#211)
• [config] The boolean key fastsync is deprecated and replaced by block_sync. (#9259) At the same time, block_sync is also deprecated. In the next release, BlocSync will always be enabled and block_sync will be removed. (#409)
• [abci/counter] Delete counter example app (#6684)
• [abci/params] Deduplicate ConsensusParams and BlockParams so only types proto definitions are use. Remove TimeIotaMs and use a hard-coded 1 millisecond value to ensure monotonically increasing block times. Rename AppVersion to App so as to not stutter. (#9287)
• [abci] Added cli commands for PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal. (#8656)
• [abci] Added cli commands for PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal. (#8901)
• [abci] Change the key and value fields from []byte to string in the EventAttribute type. (#6403)
• [abci] Make length delimiter encoding consistent (uint64) between ABCI and P2P wire-level protocols (#5783)
• [abci] New ABCI methods PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal which give the app control over transactions proposed and allows for verification of proposed blocks. (#9301)
• [abci] Removes unused Response/Request SetOption from ABCI (#9145)
• [abci] Renamed EvidenceType to MisbehaviorType and Evidence to Misbehavior as a more accurate label of their contents. (#8216)
• [abci] Renamed LastCommitInfo to CommitInfo in preparation for vote extensions. (#9122)
• [config] Rename the fastsync section and the fast_sync key blocksync and block_sync respectively (#9259)
• [p2p] Reactor Send, TrySend and Receive renamed to SendEnvelope, TrySendEnvelope and ReceiveEnvelope to allow metrics to be appended to messages and measure bytes sent/received. (#230)
• [types] Reduce the use of protobuf types in core logic. ConsensusParams, BlockParams, ValidatorParams, EvidenceParams, VersionParams have become native types. They still utilize protobuf when being sent over the wire or written to disk. Moved ValidateConsensusParams inside (now native type) ConsensusParams, and renamed it to ValidateBasic. (#9287)

BUG FIXES

• [blocksync] handle the case when the sending queue is full: retry block request after a timeout (#9518)
• [consensus] (#386) Short-term fix for the case when needProofBlock cannot find previous block meta by defaulting to the creation of a new proof block. (@adizere)
  • Special thanks to the Vega.xyz team, and in particular to Zohar (@ze97286), for reporting the problem and working with us to get to a fix.
• [consensus] Fixed a busy loop that happened when sending of a block part failed by sleeping in case of error. (#4)
• [consensus] fix round number of enterPropose when handling RoundStepNewRound timeout. (#9229)
• [docker] enable cross platform build using docker buildx (#9073)
• [docker] ensure Docker image uses consistent version of Go (#9462)
• [p2p] prevent peers who have errored from being added to peer_set (#9500)
• [state/kvindexer] Fixed the default behaviour of the kvindexer to index and query attributes by events in which they occur. In 0.34.25 this was mitigated by a separated RPC flag. @jmalicevic (#77)
• [state/kvindexer] Resolved crashes when event values contained slashes, introduced after adding event sequences in #77. @jmalicevic (#382)

FEATURES

• [abci] New ABCI methods PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal which give the app control over transactions proposed and allows for verification of proposed blocks. (#9301)

IMPROVEMENTS

• [abci] Added AbciVersion to RequestInfo allowing applications to check ABCI version when connecting to CometBFT. (#5706)
• [cli] add --hard flag to rollback command (and a boolean to the RollbackState method). This will rollback state and remove the last block. This command can be triggered multiple times. The application must also rollback state to the same height. (#9171)
• [consensus] Save peer LastCommit correctly to achieve 50% reduction in gossiped precommits. (#9760)
• [crypto] Update to use btcec v2 and the latest btcutil. (#9250)
• [e2e] Add functionality for uncoordinated (minor) upgrades (#56)
• [p2p] Reactor Send, TrySend and Receive renamed to SendEnvelope, TrySendEnvelope and ReceiveEnvelope to allow metrics to be appended to messages and measure bytes sent/received. (#230)
• [proto] Migrate from gogo/protobuf to cosmos/gogoproto (#9356)
• [rpc] Added header and header_by_hash queries to the RPC client (#9276)
• [rpc] Enable caching of RPC responses (#9650)
• [tools/tm-signer-harness] Remove the folder as it is unused (#136)

v0.34.27

Feb 27, 2023

This is the first official release of CometBFT - a fork of Tendermint Core. This particular release is intended to be compatible with the Tendermint Core v0.34 release series.

For details as to how to upgrade to CometBFT from Tendermint Core, please see our upgrading guidelines.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns or feedback on this release, we would love to hear from you! Please contact us via GitHub Discussions, Discord (in the #cometbft channel) or Telegram.

Special thanks to @wcsiu, @ze97286, @faddat and @JayT106 for their contributions to this release!

BREAKING CHANGES

• Rename binary to cometbft and Docker image to cometbft/cometbft (#152)
• The TMHOME environment variable was renamed to CMTHOME, and all environment variables starting with TM_ are instead prefixed with CMT_ (#211)
• Use Go 1.19 to build CometBFT, since Go 1.18 has reached end-of-life. (#360)

BUG FIXES

• [consensus] Fixed a busy loop that happened when sending of a block part failed by sleeping in case of error. (#4)
• [consensus] Short-term fix for the case when needProofBlock cannot find previous block meta by defaulting to the creation of a new proof block. (#386: @adizere)
  • Special thanks to the Vega.xyz team, and in particular to Zohar (@ze97286), for reporting the problem and working with us to get to a fix.
• [p2p] Correctly use non-blocking TrySendEnvelope method when attempting to send messages, as opposed to the blocking SendEnvelope method. It is unclear whether this has a meaningful impact on P2P performance, but this patch does correct the underlying behaviour to what it should be (tendermint/tendermint#9936)
• [state/kvindexer] Resolved crashes when event values contained slashes, introduced after adding event sequences. (#383: @jmalicevic)

DEPENDENCIES

• Bump tm-load-test to v1.3.0 to remove implicit dependency on Tendermint Core (#165)
• Replace tm-db with cometbft-db (#160)
• [crypto] Update to use btcec v2 and the latest btcutil (tendermint/tendermint#9787: @wcsiu)

FEATURES

• [rpc] Add match_event query parameter to indicate to the RPC that it should match events within attributes, not only within a height (tendermint/tendermint#9759)

IMPROVEMENTS

• Append the commit hash to the version of CometBFT being built (#204)
• [consensus] Add consensus_block_gossip_parts_received and consensus_step_duration_seconds metrics in order to aid in investigating the impact of database compaction on consensus performance (tendermint/tendermint#9733)
• [consensus] Reduce bandwidth consumption of consensus votes by roughly 50% through fixing a small logic bug (tendermint/tendermint#9776)
• [e2e] Add functionality for uncoordinated (minor) upgrades (#56)
• [mempool/v1] Suppress "rejected bad transaction" in priority mempool logs by reducing log level from info to debug (#314: @JayT106)
• [p2p] Reduce log spam through reducing log level of "Dialing peer" and "Added peer" messages from info to debug (tendermint/tendermint#9764: @faddat)
• [state/kvindexer] Add match.event keyword to support condition evaluation based on the event the attributes belong to (tendermint/tendermint#9759)
• [tools/tm-signer-harness] Remove the folder as it is unused (#136)

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CometBFT is a fork of Tendermint Core as of late December 2022.

Bug bounty

Friendly reminder, we have a bug bounty program.

Previous changes

For changes released before the creation of CometBFT, please refer to the Tendermint Core CHANGELOG.md.