Golem GitHub Digest #9: AMD provider support, network metrics and improved proposal handling

What’s in store for this Digest?

Since our previous GitHub Digest (#8) the Golem team has been heads down working towards the next Alpha release and gathering feedback from the Alpha II release and Provider Sneak Peek. Something that’s been particularly helpful has been the community’s involvement in providing us with logs for any issues they’ve encountered so that we can address them in the upcoming release.

So, what’s in the Golem GitHub?

To start off with we want to highlight the new Ya-runtime-vm pre-release (v0.2.2). What’s exciting about this release is that it includes support for providers using AMD processors! Up until this release, only Intel CPUs were supported as providers on the network. You can try run it yourself with:

curl -sSf https://join.golem.network/as-provider | YA_INSTALLER_VM=0.2.2 bash -

As for Yagna, there’s also been pre-release (v0.4.1) which includes the implementation of pushing of metrics from yagna daemon to a statistics page. This will help us provide a statistics page to share with the community containing lots of information about the network such as 24hour earnings, network CPU usage, accepted+paid invoices, signed agreements and negotiations, active offers, etc. If you’re interested in the code and to see where this information will be sent you can check out this Pull Request

Although not yet part of the binary releases, the ZkSync payment driver is more or less ready pending final review and checks. A huge amount of work from our whole team went into making this possible, from the research of the R&D team and then into the development and integration (a large amount of which is contained in this PR) so we’re very proud to soon have this functionality available to Golem users.

An important part of getting to mainnet and MVP is that we need all the features that allow providers and requestors to come to an agreement with one another. This includes sometimes rejecting proposals that either party doesn’t want. Up until this point nodes have accepted any proposal they’ve been offered, which works for now in the testing environment. Our developers have been working on the ability for requestors to reject a proposal given to them by a provider, including a field to provide a reason for the rejection.

Coming up

Before every release so far, the team has a feature freeze. Naturally, this continues for future releases and simply means that no significant features are added and the release is tested until tests determine that it’s ready to be the next release. As mentioned in the October AMA our current goal is to have the next release at the start of December. This means that we can likely expect to have a feature freeze at some point next week.

Digest wrap-up!

That’s everything we have for you in GitHub Digest #9. There’s a bunch of juicy details relating to our development plans in the recent Reddit AMA giving a bit of a picture of what GitHub will look like in the coming weeks. We’ll have a summary of the AMA coming out shortly. If you have any questions then feel free to join the community and ask the team.

Also don’t forget the Community Incentives Program is continuing. To get involved in the CIP join our Discord chat, get involved on Reddit, tag us in interesting conversations on Twitter, or even throw some memes in Telegram. See you in the next GitHub Digest!

PS in case you missed it, we now have a collection of resources in our new Awesome Golem list, check it out!