This week in Bitcoin Core
Bitcoin Core contributor kevkevin covers some of the latest updates...
Hello đ folks, Iâm kevkevin. Iâm an open-source developer and reporter for Insider Edition. Last week, I reviewed several pull requests from the Bitcoin Core repo. Hereâs what I found notable.
Merged PRâs
Every week, several changes are officially added to Bitcoin Core. This week, 18 changes were merged. Here are some I thought were interesting from this week.
rpc: Handle -named argument parsing where â=â character is used by zaidmstrr
Second-time contributor zaidmstrr opened this PR, which enables
-namedby default in theBitcoin RPCinterface. This means using âbitcoin rpcâ is the same as using âbitcoin-cli -namedâ because it is just a wrapper. This change also allows the user not to need to use the named parameter when using âbitcoin rpcâ. zaidmstrr provides an example in the pull request that would previously be considered an error, but now properly splits and handles the string with an â=â character correctly.build: Remove CMAKE_SKIP_BUILD_RPATH and SKIP_BUILD_RPATH settings by 151henry151
This is a CMake build change to remove two settings, CMAKE_SKIP_BUILD_RPATH and SKIP_BUILD_RPATH, that are no longer needed if you reorder the Guix build scripts to do the binary checks after installation.
This change is useful because it simplifies the Bitcoin Core build script, which is already complicated, and also removes settings that are no longer needed. While this change does not add much functionality, simplifying the code is always welcome.kernel: handle null or empty directories in implementation by stickies-v
This is another change that simplifies the code, as since empty directories may be represented with a nullptr, now btck_chainstate_manager_options_create treats both null and empty directories as invalid. Before this change, an empty directory would be considered valid, but naturally, an empty directory is essentially the same thing as a nullptr, and now they are treated as such.
There are always changes being updated and reviewed in real-time. Here are some notable PRâs that are still up and looking for reviews.
Adds a new
btck_BlockHeadertype and associated functions to create, access, and validate block headers. Block headers will have their own type (btck_BlockHeader) that can be created from raw data, copied, and queried for all the standard header fields (hash, prev hash, timestamp, bits, version, nonce). We can also extract headers from full blocks or block tree entries.
IRC meeting notes
Every week on Thursday, there is an IRC meeting. Here are some short notes from that meeting.
Kernel WG Update (TheCharlatan)
TheCharlatan: Opened an RFC issue to figure out versioning of the kernel header: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/33911
Benchmarking WG Update (l0rinc)
l0rinc: Weâve finished the article about benchmarking and performance optimization for Bitcoin Magazine: Outrunning Entropy: Why Bitcoin Canât Stand Still. Did a few full reindex-chainstate measurements for different parallelism levels for the InputFetcher to see how the cpu affects the performance: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/31132#issuecomment-3532063730 - it seems beyond ~4 threads the performance gains are usually negligible. Looking for reviewers for two PRs I had to rebase recently: #33738 and #30442 - thatâs it from me
Cluster Mempool WG Update (sdaftuar, sipa)
sipa: Review on #33629 seems to be going well, as the things being addressed seem to be becoming more nitty. sdaftuar has been benchmarking the final resulting performance impact of the invocations of linearization, hoping to tune the logic for determining how much budget to give it
Stratum v2 WG Update (sjors)
Sjors[m]1: Some small interface changes are in PRs, and the SRI team is working on a Rust client that consumes our IPC interface, which is nice.
There was some discussion after this. Check the meeting minutes for the full details
Net Split WG Update (cfields)
cfields: Very sorry to all who are waiting... still nothing to report. Working through a few other things before shifting my focus 99% to this.
asmap update (fjahr)
fjahr: Hi! The original embedding PR has been slip up into a triplet. The first part is already merged by now. The second part contains necessary refactorings and extensive added documentation in the implementation which was briefly discussed at CoreDev and should hopefully help getting people through this toughest part of the review. The third adds the build stuff (and that is the PR that used to be the main thing).
fjahr: There have also been some spin-off discussions on how the -asmap arg should work and this resulted in two separate PRs that are currently open. All this can be found through the freshly rebooted tracking issue: #33879.
For the full log, check the meeting in minutes
Releases
No major releases
Thank you for reading. Be sure to tune in again next week for your updates on Bitcoin Core!
If there are any comments, suggestions, or errors, do not hesitate to reach out or comment
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