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Q4 report for besu #92

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Q4 report for besu
jflo Jan 10, 2025
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---
layout: default
title: 2024 Q4 Hyperledger Besu
parent: 2024
grand_parent: Project Updates
---

# Project Health

The Besu project continues to thrive. [Fleet Mode](https://consensys.io/blog/besu-fleet-the-future-of-rpc-scaling) has bolstered interest in Besu from public blockchain networks and private chains, with both Layer 2 and RPC providers considering Besu for their infrastructure. Community activity on Discord is stable, though external contributions are at a seasonal lull. Overall, the project remains healthy.

# Questions/Issues for the TOC

Besu contributors have been asking to use a single [CLA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement) instead of the DCO requirement for every commit, which is a source of unnecessary friction. The new [LFDT Charter](https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/about/charter) does not mention anything about requiring either, and as such the Besu team intends to relax the DCO requirement in favor of a single CLA.
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Has there been any discussions with LF Legal about this requested change?

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Yes via discord, no answers yet.

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We had a discussion at the January 16th TAC meeting on this topic. It is important to note that even with CLA, the Linux Foundation requires that the DCO sign-offs will still happen on the code. Typically, the only reason that projects choose CLAs if they need a higher level of copyright protections.


# Releases

This quarters releases:

- 24.10.0
- 24.12.0
- 24.12.1
- 24.12.2

Highlights include:

- named network support for the Ephemery testnet. This is a public testnet that will be torn down and rebuilt from scratch periodically. This implementation was submitted by a non-maintainer, thanks [@gconnect](https://github.com/gconnect)!

As usual, each release also included important bug fixes.

Challenges include:

- post release of 24.12.0 we noticed that some nodes can freeze up to 2 hours when opening RocksDB database. Besu was impacted by an upstream change in RocksDB (our database) as we moved from RocksDB 8.3.2 in Besu 24.10.0 to RocksDB 9.7.3 in Besu 24.12.0. This change triggers some compaction work depending on the size of the database to apply the new configuration (recommended). Not all upgraded nodes faced the freeze, and this was not seen during testing. The compaction can still happen in the background, but some users reported up to 2 hours freeze.
- 24.12.1 was a hotfix to address publishing besu maven artifacts.



# Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Over the past several months, the Besu team and community contributors have addressed a variety of enhancements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations. A number of improvements target transaction processing speed, and accompanying metrics to better visualize and analyze those improvements.

Equally notable is the growing community involvement in troubleshooting, code reviews, and feature proposals. Contributors have tackled concurrency issues, refactored internal modules, updated dependencies, and implemented new configuration options—efforts that reduce technical debt while enabling better customization for diverse use cases.

Since the deprecation of the Hyperledger brand, the Besu project has begun the process of migrating their repositories to the `besu-eth` organization on GitHub.

The team has adopted automation to better manage issues- GitHub actions are used to mark any issues or prs that have had no activity for the last 2 weeks as stale, and if they are not tended to in the subsequent 2 weeks they will be closed. This will enforce regular review of issues.

# Current Plans

The Prague and Osaka upgrades will be the primary focus in Q1 2025. We continue to invest in our plugin architecture and modularizing the codebase to accommodate that. Integration with the Portal Network will be invested in to reduce the storage footprint required by mainnet nodes.

# Contributor Diversity

Due to an increase in trivial or automatically generated PRs, we have had to refine our [policies around insignificant contributions](https://github.com/hyperledger/besu/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#guidelines-for-non-code-and-other-trivial-contributions) likely intended to farm future rewards.
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While I understand that trivial contributions do take time to address, this can sometimes be the first entry that a new contributor has to the project that will allow them to understand the overall process of contribution. Also, given the introduction of a stalebot, it is very likely that these small issues will never be resolved as they are too low on the priority list. Maybe it would be good to allow for a new contributor to fix the batch of these issues by marking them as good first issues and/or help wanted. I would ask that the Besu maintainers determine if they are closing off too many potential avenues for contribution from new contributors who may turn into long-time contributors and possibly maintainers.

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These are PRs being submitted without a corresponding issue, so no existing known work is being handled, and any "good first issues" will remain available for sincere contributors.

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Thank you @tkuhrt for bringing up the topic for discussion in the TAC meeting.

  1. The current sentence in the CONTRIBUTING.md uses a strong language that may sound unwelcoming to new contributors. Please consider and re-evaluate the sentence "keep in mind that we do not accept non-code contributions".
  2. Has the project team explored an option to trigger CI process on demand for new contributors? This will bar the automated tools/spam tools from overloading the resources.
  3. Does the project team have insights into how many automated PRs are raised? This may be a concern across all the projects, more information will assist and set-up a general recommendation across LF Decentralized Trust.
  4. Has the project team considered moving the documents to its own repository? This may keep the CI systems free of non-code contributions from running the tests.


# Additional Information