There have been multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals [EIP] submitted for approval, but only a handful managed to get approved for its upcoming hardfork – Istanbul. A new set of updates were released by the devs for Geth called Blue Thessia [v1.9.2], a multipurpose command line tool running a full Ethereum node. It includes features for its Istanbul hardfork.
Peter Szilagyi, team leader at Ethereum, informed the community about these bug fixes and minor feature updates on GitHub. The update brings along features like,
- Rework client tracking for light servers to better prioritize requests, making it fairer for everyone (#19745).
- Avoid retrieving full blocks for GraphQL queries on light clients if the query relies on headers (#19886).
- Support closing a simulated backends, avoiding a goroutine leak during log running tests (#19902).
- Support eth_call overriding chain state before execution, see API docs for details (#19917).
- Replace all user facing passphrase labels with password to avoid confusion (#19932).
Apart from the newly added features, the update fixed problems like RPC annoyance where inclusion information for pending transactions was 0, instead of null. It also allowed the builder to extract commit hashes from detached git branches.
The update made important additions to the list, noting significant Istanbul changes. The GitHub report mentioned the re-factorization of the internal chain configuration in order to allow enabling EIPs individually during tests. Apart from the addition, the team implemented EIP-1884, EIP-1108, and EIP-1344, to lay the groundwork of the upcoming hardfork. The report noted,
- Implement EIP-1884: Repricing for trie-size-dependent opcodes (#19743)
- Implement EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs (#19904)
- Implement EIP-1344: ChainID opcode (#19921)
According to the timeline of the project, the team will release a projected date for the testnet network upgrade soon and the mainnet upgrade is tentatively scheduled for October 16, 2019.
