Release of Daml 2.8.1

Summary

This is a maintenance release that addresses several issues.

What’s New

Canton

Daml enterprise now supports replicating a party from one participant node to another for migration or to have multiple participants hosting the same party. The party replication documentation has the details.

We have improved the background journal cleaning to reduce database load by using smaller transactions to clean up the journal.

The metrics for the executor services have been removed since they were not actively used and could have a negative performance impact under high load.

We have reworked the reference configuration example examples/03_advanced_configuration. The updated example contains the full configuration which can be customized by removing unneeded parts. The installation documentation has been updated accordingly.

Fabric Driver

When the in-memory blocks exceed 5000, an unexpected shutdown could occur which stops further block processing.  This occurs in a rare situation where the driver is catching up after being stopped and the Fabric Ledger size has increased greatly while it was stopped.  The workaround when this occurred was to restart the sequencer.  This workaround is no longer needed because this has been fixed.

Daml SDK

The multiple DAR build feature could fail to properly parse daml.yaml files that contained only the parameters `sdk-version` and `build-options`, mistakenly treating them as full packages and trying to build them.

Installation or Download

The Daml 2.8.1 SDK has been released. You can install it using the command:  daml install 2.8.1.

The table below lists how you can download Daml Enterprise or individual components.

If you are using Oracle JVM and testing security provider signatures, you should note that the provided Canton JAR file embeds the BouncyCastle Provider as a dependency. To enable the JVM to verify the signature, you need to put the “bcprov” JAR on the classpath before the Canton Standalone JAR. For example:

java -cp bcprov-jdk15on-1.70.jar:canton-with-drivers-2.8.1-all.jar com.digitalasset.canton.CantonEnterpriseApp

Note: The Docker images are designed to be minimal in size and attack surface, and are thus suitable for production use. Minimal images can sometimes make debugging difficult (e.g. no shell in the containers). For convenience, we provide “debug” versions of each of the above images, which you can access by appending “-debug” to the image tag (e.g. digitalasset-docker.jfrog.io/http-json:2.8.1-debug).