Bee v1.6 Release

Published in

Ethereum Swarm

3 min readMay 17, 2022

The Swarm Foundation has just released Bee v1.6! Please update your nodes!

This latest release is an accumulation of a lot of work done in the last couple of months by the team. We’ve improved and refactored substantial amount of components and areas of the codebase as well as fixed a few critical bugs. The node now has an option to bootstrap the postage information partially from a snapshot stored on Swarm(!). This saves on the initial syncing time significantly, and reduces the amount of chain calls you would need to do.

After deploying this version your node will need a complete blockchain resync, so please allow it time to sync and in case you’re updating several nodes at the same time — make sure to stage the update in a way that does not cause a lot of them to go offline at the same time due to the long restart time caused by chain syncing.

Breaking changes

Global pinning has been discontinued from bee. We’re looking for ways to enable this sort of solution as an L2 solution on Swarm (#2906, #2869)
Nodes will now try to connect to the mainnet by default. In order to connect to the testnet you must specify --mainnet=false (#2859)

Hardening

Chain syncing errors will again result in 24h blocking (#2922)
We’ve improved resilience on hibernation and network failure (#2887)
Added a missing stream reset stream on add context header fail (#2885)

New features

Added a new db indices command to debug database indices (#2924)
Added a wallet endpoint to display wallet information for various purposes (#2900)
Exposed current block height from chain backend for the chainstate endpoint so that chain syncing status can be displayed (#2893)
The node will now log its own overlay address on startup (#2930)
Print required funds for gas and respect deployment gas price (#2861)
The node has now an option to bootstrap the postage information partially from a snapshot stored on Swarm(!). This saves on the initial syncing time significantly, and reduces the amount of chain calls you would need to do (#2814, #2910)

Bug Fixes

Added fallback content length check in middleware (#2907)
Fixed a bug where unpinning of encrypted references resulted in an error (#2896)
Fixed a panic for the stewardship endpoint in dev mode (#2889)
CORS are now allowed in dev mode (#2866)
Fixed a deadly deadlock in sharky that was caused when a context was cancelled on a Read call (#2932, #2948)
Fixed a bug where an error on shutdown would cause issues when reloading stamp issuers on startup (#2914)
Fixed a bug where the wrong amount was displayed when purchasing a postage stamp in dev mode (#2945)
Removed the free slot optimization from sharky to circumvent shard leakage (#2953)

Performance improvements

The postage package has been rewritten and has significant simplifications that should result in a smoother and more correct operation (#2810, #2890, #2895)

For the full release notes including a complete PR rundown, please read here

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