Lucky Leprechaun (v1.9.1)

Geth v1.9.1 is a small biweekly maintenance release. For all the major new features in the 1.9 family, please see our blog post from two weeks ago.

• Add eth_getHeaderByNumber and eth_getHeaderByHash to get headers without bodies (#19669).
• Update the go-ethereum list of authors to July 22nd state, bringing up the count to 367 (#19873).
• Switch out the websocket library, adding support for pings and continuation frames (#19866).
• Implement a 1/288th grace period for the faucet to avoid request drift (5m for 24h) (#18105).
• Add debug_accountRange to query all or part of the accounts at a given root (#17438).
• Fix a crash in the transaction pool caused by the 1.9.0 internal rework (#19835).
• Fix a crash in geth dumpconfig caused by the release oracle fields (#19825).
• Fix the reported derivation paths of hardware wallet accounts in Clef (#19827).
• Fix geth --dev thinking it's mainnet and requesting 4GB memory (#19875).
• Fix debug_chaindbProperty, which returns an internal error (#19856).
• Fix build script on OpenBSD (#17966).

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.9.1 release milestone.

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As with all our previous releases, you can find the:

• Pre-built binaries for all platforms on our downloads page.
• Docker images published under ethereum/client-go.
• Ubuntu packages in our Launchpad PPA repository.
• OSX packages in our Homebrew Tap repository.

Full Biotic Kick (v1.9.0)

After many months of silence, we're proud to announce the v1.9.0 release of Go Ethereum! Although this release has been in the making for a lot longer than we anticipated, we're confident there will be some juicy feature for everyone to enjoy!

Posting a list of changes here wouldn't do this release justice, so we've prepared an entire blog post to walk through all the major features: Geth v1.9.0 - Six months distilled.

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As with all our previous releases, you can find the:

• Pre-built binaries for all platforms on our downloads page.
• Docker images published under ethereum/client-go.
• Ubuntu packages in our Launchpad PPA repository.
• OSX packages in our Homebrew Tap repository.

Punisher (v1.8.27)

Geth v1.8.27 is a hotfix release to counter an active attack on mainnet, mounted against newly joining Geth nodes doing fast sync (#19473).

• If you are already in sync with the network, you don't need to update.
• Archive nodes, light clients and full-sync full nodes don't need to update.
• If you are joining the network with a new node, then you do need to update.

Background

Fast sync is susceptible to a grieving version of an eclipse attack, where a malicious remote node attempts to get a new Geth node to fast sync to some small chain, before a real heavy chain is discovered in the network. This results in Geth falling back to full sync for the main chain, taking too much time.

This attack can only be meaningfully mounted against nodes which are properly exposed on a public IP address (i.e. not firewalled, not NATed). Even then, it's a race against the node finding good peers fast enough, in which case the attack doesn't work any more.

There is no economic advantage in pulling this attack off, only causing sync annoyance. That said, there is currently a number of (at least 4 identified, maybe more) Parity nodes at 207.148.5.229, which are doing variations of this attack. It might be deliberate, or it might also be leftover nodes from some experiment that only have a few blocks on their chain and subsequently disabled sync. A bit unprobable.

Solution

This release repurposes the DAO challenge to do a checkpoint challenge based on the recently hard coded CHTs. It also makes the challenge stricter, in that while the node is doing a fast-sync, remote peers are not permitted to be synced below the checkpoint block. This should also help sync the chain faster, getting rid of stalling or useless peers.

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Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

Light Ball (v1.8.26)

Geth v1.8.26 is a tiny light client DoS hotfix. We've dropped support for les/1 on master (v1.9.0 unstable) and after some light servers updated, v1.8.x light clients started crashing. Turned out that les/2 on the v1.8.x release family relied on some les/1 throttling data (#19437).

If you don't use the light client, you don't need to update. Light servers don't need to update either.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

White Ball (v1.8.25)

Geth v1.8.25 is a tiny hotfix on top of the recently released v1.8.24. During back-porting PRs into v1.8.24, one was merged incorrectly and resulted disabling 2 CLI flags (--rpccorsdomain and --rpcvhosts). You can see the fix in #19416. If you are not using these flag, you're fine to remain on the v1.8.24 release.

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To recap our original notes, Geth v1.8.24 v1.8.25 is a small maintenance release aiming to be the final version of the 1.8.x family before rolling out our next major milestone (v1.9.0). As the previous release, v1.8.24 v1.8.25 only back-ports stability fixes. A grab bag of the changes included are:

• Add --rpc.gascap to limit the gas eth_call and eth_estimateGas may use.
• Baked in the Rinkeby Petersburg fork block 4321234 (~4th May, 2019).
• Updated light client CHTs for quicker sync times on all built-in networks.
• Fixes the builders and macos file descriptors if using with Go 1.12+.
• Fixes a log filtering issue that didn't report reorged EVM events.
• Fixes a couple of networking issues in the DHT and eth.
• Memory optimizations around timestamp handling.

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the originally Geth 1.8.24 back-port pull request.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

Pointy Eightball (v1.8.24)

We've found a tiny issue in this release which accidentally disabled two CLI flags around RPC CORS and VHosts handling. If you rely on these, please see the Geth v1.8.25 hotfix release.

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Geth v1.8.24 is a small maintenance release aiming to be the final version of the 1.8.x family before rolling out our next major milestone (v1.9.0). As the previous release too, v1.8.24 only back-ports stability fixes. A grab bag of the changes included are:

• Add --rpc.gascap to limit the gas eth_call and eth_estimateGas may use.
• Baked in the Rinkeby Petersburg fork block 4321234 (~4th May, 2019).
• Updated light client CHTs for quicker sync times on all built-in networks.
• Fixes the builders and macos file descriptors if using with Go 1.12+.
• Fixes a log filtering issue that didn't report reorged EVM events.
• Fixes a couple of networking issues in the DHT and eth.
• Memory optimizations around timestamp handling.

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.8.24 back-port pull request.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

Xircus (v1.8.23)

Geth v1.8.23 is a small, scheduled maintenance release that brings a couple of improvements to various sync and block processing mechanisms. The selection of fixes have been back-ported from master and are not a full release of our latest code:

• Fix transaction tracers to handle legacy Frontier/Homestead state transitions (631e2f0).
• Fix block importing regressions caused by the side chain rework (3a95128, 3ab9dcc, 4da2092).
• Fix a trie decoding issue that could cause a state sync to crash (a458153).
• Fix the file descriptor crash on newer versions of macos (048b463, 7bd6f39).
• Fix the PPA that broke due to Travis' firewall (9f5fb15, 276f824, b247052, 84cb00a, df355ec).
• Fix the iOS CocoaPods builds failing due to upstream dependency issues (d9be337, fe5258b).
• Fix various data races in the cache library we used for trie reads (992a7bb).

The release also back-ports native support for the Görli testnet via the --goerli flag (2072c26).

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.8.23 back-port pull request.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

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This release contains Swarm v0.3.11 with the following improvements:

• Improved peer suggestion engine (#18404).
• Bootnode mode and new bootnodes (#18498, #18509).
• Network snapshot generator (#18453).
• Saturation check for healthy networks (#19071).
• PSS: Updated to whisper V6 (#19023).
• Added a debug tool: global-store (#19014).
• Added debugging APIs to make it easier to explore chunks on nodes (#18980, #19002, #19008).
• Multiple data races were fixed (#18459, #18460, #18462, #18464,#18511, #18993, #19017, #19049, #19051).

Swarm binaries are available on the Swarm download page.

Can'tstantinople (v1.8.22)

Geth v1.8.22 re-enables all Constantinople changes and contains an additional fork, Petersburg,
to disable EIP-1283. This procedure is meant to ease the transition on networks like Ropsten where
the Constantinople transition had already taken place when an issue with EIP-1283 was discovered.
On the main network, Constantinople and Petersburg activate at the same time.

The block numbers are:

• 7280000 for Constantinople on Mainnet
• 7280000 for Petersburg on Mainnet
• 4939394 for Petersburg on Ropsten

Note that the Petersburg change is set to activate simultaneously with Constantinople unless
configured otherwise. If you are running a private network, you must schedule the Petersburg
fork through chain configuration before updating to v1.8.22 if Constantinople has already
activated on your network.

In addition to the consensus changes, this release contains peer-to-peer networking security
improvements in the peer discovery subsystem.

List of all changes:

• core, cmd/puppeth: implement constantinople fix, disable EIP-1283 (#18486)
• p2p/discover, p2p/enode: rework endpoint proof handling, packet logging (#18963)
• p2p/discover: improve table addition code (#18974)
• travis, appveyor: bump to Go 1.11.5 (#18947)

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

Byzantium Revert (v1.8.21)

Geth 1.8.21 is an emergency hotfix release to postpone the mainnet Constantinople upgrade! The reason is a last minute reentrancy vulnerability dicovered by ChainSecurity.

If you don't feel comfortable with upgrading to Geth 1.8.21, you also have the option to:

• Downgrade to Geth 1.8.19; or
• Continue running Geth 1.8.20 using the --override.constantinople=9999999 flag.

See details here.

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Beside the emergency Constantinople delay, the release also contains some tweaks:

• Return the pending nonce from the transaction pool, not the pending block (#15794).
• Accept application/json-rpc too as the RPC API content type (#18310).
• Sanitize transaction pool config to avoid invalid user settings (#17210).
• Convert ABI names to properly camel-cased names (#16513, #18372).
• Warn the user when the IPC path is too long for the kernel (#18330).
• Support CALLs from the Go APIs against specific blocks (#17942).
• Bubble up internal ABI parsing errors to the caller (#17328).
• Support dumping the CLI configs directly to a file (#18327).
• Switch Keccak implementation to upstream Go (#18390).
• Add CREATE2 support to the callTracer (#18318).
• Bump all builders to Go 1.11.4 (#18314).

And some bugfixes:

• Fix a downloader panic caused by the side chain import rework (#18335).
• Fix an ABI unpacking issue when parsing 2 dimensional slices (#18321, #18364).
• Fix a discovery protocol error when looking up remote peers (#18309).
• Fix puppeth panic when using degenerate genesis configs (#18344).
• Fix compilation regression on PPC64 processors (#18376).
• Fix broken database version tracking (#18429).

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.8.21 release milestone.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

Constant (v1.8.20)

Geth v1.8.20 is a bit of a special release. On one hand it's the release that finally enables the Constantinople hard fork on mainnet at block 7080000 (and Rinkeby at block 3660663). It's also our last planned release of the 1.8 family (we'll still do hotfixes if need be), meaning that we'll start merging backwards incompatible changes onto master in preparation of Geth 1.9.0 (we don't have an ETA for it, but January the earliest).

Notable changes in the release are:

• Hard code the mainnet and Rinkeby Constantinople hard-fork block numbers (#18268)
• Allow overriding the Constantinople hard-fork block from the command line (#18273).
• Remove the artificial 2K file descriptor limit from Geth, use all allowed (#18211).
• Support exporting genesis specs to Parity and Aleth from Puppeth (#18172).
• Support the new (1.23) docker_compose APIs change in Puppeth (18281).
• Enforce lowercase network names on Puppeth private networks (#18235).
• Support standard-tracing transactions straight to the filesystem (#17914).
• Support whitelisting blocks help chain selection during forks (#18028).
• Support big number constructors on the mobile libraries (#17828).
• Support arrays of dynamic types in abigen and abi (#18051).
• Update go-leveldb to reduce CPU overhead a bit (#18205).
• Warn when using deprecated config files (#18199).

Notable bug fixes are:

• Fully disable the USB HID on macos on --nousb, avoiding rare crashes (#18213).
• Fix a tracer error in the pre-state JavaScript tracer (#18253).
• Fix the Puppeth faucet connectivity issue (18281).

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.8.20 release milestone.

Geth binaries and mobile libraries are available on the Geth download page.

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This release contains Swarm v0.3.8, which contains:

• Uniform PSS API (18218).
• P2P simulations snapshot improvements (18220).

Swarm binaries are available on the Swarm download page.