The state of Gossamer September - October

[P1sar]

The state of Gossamer September - October

Highlights

Jimmy Johnson hopped on the @TheKusamarian's Space Monkeys podcast to talk about bringing the JAM Gray Paper to life.

Axay has completed his article on the subject of candidate endorsements, which will be made available to the public in the near future.

Development

WARP Sync

The WARP Sync implementation by Diego is still in progress and it is anticipated that it will be completed within the next couple of weeks.

Eclesio has designed the gap sync protocol. Gap sync is a method to fill gaps between blocks. While WARP Sync is a method that retrieve specific block headers from the network with the goal to reach the tip of the chain quickly, it leaves gaps in the chain that needs to be filled. We will start implementing it as soon as our WARP Sync implementation is finished.

Polkadot Storage

Tim Wu has been able to complete some work (PRs #4221 and #4239) regarding TrieDB that is required to have a performant lazy loaded trie that supports nodel level caching between ephemeral tries, as well as proof generation when accessing node values. Now that the TrieDB integration points have been fully implemented, we will be able to move forward with implementing the larger client DB and eventually integrating into the existing Gossamer codebase.

Polkadot Parachain protocol implementation

Kishan and Axay were engaged in research concerning recent modifications regarding the Async Backing and Elastic Scaling features. Despite the fact that these alterations are currently being integrated into the Parity Rust implementation and have already been deployed to Polkadot, there is still a necessity for their implementation on our side.

Ed finished work on Candidate Validation and after a small break Ed is going to start the design phase of the Availability Recovery subsystem of Parachains protocol.

Haiko began the design phase for the Availability bitfield distribution protocol while also familiarizing himself with our codebase.

Improvements and bug fixes

Jimmy implemented an improved protocol for neighbour messaging. This encompasses the capacity to process received neighbour messages, the capability to transmit neighbour messages accurately, and the ability to monitor the status of our neighbours, which informs our decision-making regarding message recipients.

Additionally, an issue was encountered during the synchronization process with Paseo on block #1789153. Jimmy initiated an investigation into this matter, but no conclusive results have been obtained thus far. Further details can be found in this Stack Exchange question.

JAM protocol implementation

Jimmy has completed some reviews and tests for JAM PVM implementation that was implemented by Eclesio. JAM codec work and block serialisation functionality have been finished.