Weekly Dev Update #89

24 February 2020 —Admin

Hey Y’all,

This week we continued to focus on collecting user feedback and bug reports, and integrating cross-platform fixes into the Session clients. The Lokinet team started to focus on some final issues found with path handovers, in the leadup to Lokinet 0.7.0. On the Loki Core side, we worked on additional LNS functionality, such as being able to change LNS mappings post-registration.

Loki Core

Rewrite the integration tests to use named pipes for IPC
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1045
Loki name service – update mapping via transaction
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1044
Make copy of change_dts in transfer_selected_rct
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1043
Lower Blink fees and make Blink default
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1042
Fix “Priority = 5” not submitting Blink transactions
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1041
Allow get_staking_requirement to return current height
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-core/pull/1038

Lokinet

If you’re on our Discord you can catch Jeff, the lead developer of LLARP, live streaming as he codes at https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519. He typically streams on Tuesday mornings, 9am – 12pm Eastern (US) time.

What went on last week with Lokinet: Various fixes, optimizations, and diagnostics. Lokinet stability during establishing and staying connection is now very good with the recent changes. We now have a good idea of the remaining occasional disconnection issue on handover: it happens because published introsets include intros that are expiring before the introset and, potentially, leaving the client with no valid paths (even though it has a valid introset). We expect to fix this early this week, and we’re aiming to tag a release candidate later in the week.

We also added a small but useful feature this week: allowing clients to suppress publishing introsets when they don’t want to be reachable by other clients. Previously, every client was always reachable (as long as you knew the address), but there are many cases where a client might not want to be reachable; this change allows clients to establish new outbound connections but not allow incoming connections.

PR Activity:

Load Catch2 test suite apparatus via submodule instead of keeping a copy –
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1103
Reduce introset publishing frequency to 2.5 minutes instead of 1.25 minutes
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1104
Spread out path builds to avoid needing to build many simultaneously
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1105
Allow clients to be unreachable by not publishing introsets
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1093
Make routers not talk to older, incompatible routers
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1108
Second half of introset redundancies: implement redundant introset publishing
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1111
,
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1114
Handle multiple introset lookup responses properly
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1115/files
Better debugging output for paths
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1116
Fix internal JSONRPC interface to allow passing arguments
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1113
Update travis-ci osx build to stop failing
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1119
Switch to newer introsets when received
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1121
Remove abseil dependency. Abseil is a library conglomeration (similar to boost), created by Google. Its interfaces are decidedly non-modern and we decided it was more a nuisance than a benefit.
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/1124
(also PRs #1110, #1122, #1123). Dropping abseil makes the build faster and produces smaller binaries.
Change log format to output UTC, and provide a more friendly formatting of the uptime ([+1h12m07.123s] instead of [+4327123 ms]) — included in the abseil PRs, above.

Session

Loki MQ

Loki MQ is a communications layer for various components that allows more efficient and reliable communication between service nodes and storage servers and, in the future, between wallets and nodes and other loki components.