Skip to content

Eclair v0.5.1
Compare
Choose a tag to compare
@t-bast t-bast released this 03 Mar 12:33
· 716 commits to master since this release
v0.5.1
98bb7be
This commit was created on GitHub.com and signed with GitHub’s verified signature. The key has expired.
GPG key ID: 4AEE18F83AFDEB23
Expired
Learn about vigilant mode.

This release includes many bug fixes and improvements, a new API and monitoring updates.
It is fully compatible with 0.5.0 (and all previous versions of eclair).

Major changes

Improved startup performance

When eclair starts up and restores channels, it makes a lot of calls to bitcoind to check the status of each channel.
We improved our calling pattern to greatly reduce the number of calls made when some channels are closing.
This is particularly noticeable when the mempool is quite full and you have many channels.

See #1699 for details.

Gossip sync improvements

Most of the bandwidth consumed by lightning nodes is due to gossip (syncing the network graph).
When your eclair node has a lot of peers and doesn't use a sync-whitelist, you may end up syncing with many different peers and obtaining redundant information, thus wasting bandwidth.
Eclair now only syncs with peers you have a channel with to reduce bandwidth usage.

Anchor outputs

This release contains a lot of changes for the upcoming anchor outputs commitment format:

  • the feerate of the commitment transaction is kept low to improve off-chain channel usage
  • transactions with multiple inputs and outputs are now supported
  • CPFP and RBF utilities have been added to increase the feerate of commitment and htlc transactions

While you can start experimenting with this commitment format, it is still not safe to activate in production.
Anchor outputs is a complex and subtle change that requires re-architecting most of our transaction broadcasting logic and utxo management.
We are making steady progress towards that, but we're not there yet.

Monitoring changes

Kamon tracing has been removed in this release.
It was too invasive in the codebase, generally unused and was costing some bandwidth.
We've found that metrics and logs are enough to correctly monitor your eclair node.

Additional metrics to monitor transaction signing have been added.
The rate of transaction signatures is a good indicator of how busy your node is.

API changes

This release adds a new path-finding API:

  • findroutebetweennodes lets you inspect the network graph by looking for routes between two nodes (whereas findroute only allowed finding routes between your node and a remote node)

Head over to our API documentation for more details.

Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes

  • Correctly sort addresses in its node_announcement (#1693)
  • Allow 2016 blocks before unconfirmed channels are forgotten (#1692)
  • Re-emit private channel updates more frequently, improving payments to mobile wallets (#1671)
  • Correctly handle channel failures in private routing hints, fixing an edge case for payments to mobile wallets (#1675)
  • Drop support for initial_routing_sync: this was bandwidth-heavy and now unnecessary (#1683)
  • Fix an MPP-send edge-case (#1685)
  • Fix race condition between outgoing payment and peer disconnection (#1688)
  • Fix race condition between update_fee and shutdown, which could lead to channels stuck in shutdown (#1661)
  • Ensure transactions we publish always meet bitcoin's min_relay_fee (#1687)
  • Fix an edge case where an HTLC failure was not correctly relayed upstream if revoke_and_ack had not been received (#1706)

Verifying signatures

You will need gpg and our release signing key 7A73FE77DE2C4027. Note that you can get it:

To import our signing key:

$ gpg --import drouinf.asc

To verify the release file checksums and signatures:

$ gpg -d SHA256SUMS.asc > SHA256SUMS.stripped
$ sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.stripped

Building

Eclair builds are deterministic. To reproduce our builds, please use the following environment (*):

  • Ubuntu 19.10
  • AdoptOpenJDK 11.0.6
  • Maven 3.6.3

Use the following command to generate the eclair-node package:

mvn clean install -DskipTests

That should generate eclair-node/target/eclair-node-0.5.1-XXXXXXX-bin.zip with sha256 checksums that match the one we provide and sign in SHA256SUMS.asc

(*) You may be able to build the exact same artefacts with other operating systems or versions of JDK 11, we have not tried everything.

Upgrading

This release is fully compatible with Eclair v0.5.0. You don't need to close your channels, just stop eclair, upgrade and restart.

Changelog

Thanks to our new contributors, @tompro and @ariskk!

Assets 6
Loading