Geth v1.10.12 is a scheduled maintenance release, but also contains some significant features!

The release enables the Arrow Glacier hard-fork, scheduled approximately for the 8th of December. The sole change is to postpone the difficulty-bomb until summer 2022, by which time hopefully The Merge will have happened.

The release also ships support for a new PoW testnet called Sepolia. This testnet was dreamed up during the merge interop in Athens and it's purpose is to replace Ropsten after the merge as the main cross client testnet. You can access it via geth --sepolia. Being a PoW testnet, it's possible to mine it for Ether to use as test funds.

Lastly, the release also contains a brand new call tracer implemented in Go, which should be significantly (2.5x) faster than the one currently used. You can use the new tracer via debug.traceTransaction("0xhash", {tracer: "callTracer"}). The original JavaScript tracer is still available for fallback purposes called callTracerLegacy. The latter will be dropped if nobody reports issues with the native one.

Improvements:

• Implement the Arrow Glacier hard fork and schedule (#23810).
• Bake in support for the Sepolia PoW test network (#23730).
• Switch the call tracer to a fast native Go implementation (#23867, #23708).
• Optimize nonce handling performance in the txpool (#22231).
• Support password protected SSH key files in puppeth (#22148).
• Optimize request/response matching in RPC batch queries (#23856).
• Support transferring snapshots via geth db export snapshot (#22931).
• Read chain data atomically from ancients/leveldb, avoiding an extra read (#23566).
• Improve the hexutil package's big-int encoding performance by 50% (#23780)
• Remove the xgo cross compiler as docker auto-build limits killed it (#23800).
• Support invalid RLP blobs (at least fail gracefully) in the state t8n tool (#23771).

Bug-fixes:

• Fix a crash in LES serving code (#23865).
• Fix a data race in the miner's receipt copying code (#23835).
• Fix a missing snapshot error after recovering from a crash (#23496).
• Fix a memory leak in Clique if the network temporarilly halts (#23861).
• Fix a crash if the disk gets full during ethash DAG generation (#23799).
• Fix chain tracing to not go OOM during long running sessions (#23736).
• Fix the simulated backend to allow running EIP-1559 transactions (#23838, #23840).
• Fix an RPC crash when getting the signer of an empty Clique chain (#23832).
• Fix the total difficulty number of nil-diff genesis blocks in the database (#23793).
• Fix a crash in abigen generated code if backend header retrieval fails (#23781).

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.10.12 release milestone.

As with all our previous releases, you can find the:

• Pre-built binaries for all platforms on our downloads page.
• Docker images published under ethereum/client-go.
• Ubuntu packages in our Launchpad PPA repository.
• OSX packages in our Homebrew Tap repository.