2016 04 28 TSC Minutes

Hyperledger Project

Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Meeting

dummyfile.txt

Ethereum Virtual Machine and Execution Environment Overview.pdf

April 28, 2016 (7:00am - 8:30am PT) via GoToMeeting

TSC Members

Emmanuel Viale

Accenture

Yes

Stan Liberman

CME Group

Yes

Tamas Blummer

DAH

Yes

Stefan Teis

Deutsche Boerse Group


Pardha Vishnumolakala

DTCC

Yes

Hart Montgomery

Fujitsu

Yes

Satoshi Oshima

Hitachi


Chris Ferris

IBM

Yes

Mic Bowman

Intel

Yes

David Voell

J.P. Morgan

Yes

Richard G. Brown

R3

Yes


Resources:


Agenda

  • Ethereum technical stack and roadmap (Vitalik Buterin)
  • Action Item Review (Chris Ferris)
  • Technical F2F Agenda Planning (Chris Ferris)
  • WG Updates (WG Leads)


Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin)

  • Vitalik presented the Ethereum Deck
  • Discussion
    • Q:  Do contracts run on 1 EVM?
      • There is one EVM protocol.  When an account sends a transaction to a contract that spins up an EVM execution instance.  If in the middle of EVM execution instance, that contract sends a subcall to another contract, that spins up another execution instance.
    • Q:  Does this model work the same in private chains, where you might not have same economics with ether?
      • The notion of gas is not dependent on the notion of ether.  Gas is really a metering technique. On the public chain, a transaction may say “I will spend up to 1M gas, and will pay .0000005 ether per gas for that” and the miner can include or not include the transaction.  Once it is established that transaction is included, there is no real link between gas and ether.
      • Gas limits in Ethereum is like bytes in Bitcoin.
    • Q:  Within EVM, operation called EC Recover?
      • EC Recover is not an op code, it is a pre-compile.
    • CF:  First stage would be to get EVM integrated into HLP, then could explore to get account model to achieve what was being discussed.  Technical F2F next week, is there a possibility to do some experimentation during this?
      • AK:  Yes. Vitalik is speaking at Consensus.  ConsenSys is happy to help with integration as you see fit.
      • Vitalik:  Will be at Consensus.  In general, Ethereum Foundation is quite busy, cannot contribute FTEs to this.  But, happy to participate as much as possible.
      • AK:  have a few developers at ConsenSys that could likely help.
    • Ram:  Archictecture WG next Friday -- would love Vitalik to attend.  We are talking about evolving architecture moving forward.
      • Vitalik: send me an email offline.


Action Item Review

  • TSC representation policy draft (Chris Ferris)
    • Will complete draft by next week
  • Finalize Technical F2F date/venue (Todd)
  • Whitepaper draft to be complete by May 5th (Dave Voell)
    • Hopeful to have 1st draft by mid-next week for review in WG, hopeful to share this outside of WG at that point, but not guaranteed.
  • Set up Sawtooth lake repo by April 28th (Patrick)
  • Connect Patrick with Ry to figure out plan for Sawtooth Lake repo(s) (Todd)
  • Create Fabric-API repo and annotate readme (Tamas)
    • Still working on this
  • Doodle poll for 1 hour exit criteria call (Todd)
    • Plan to hold exit criteria discussion at F2F


Techincal F2F Agenda Planning

  • CF:  Plan for similar to what happened last time, hacking on various experiments, EVM exploration.  Also, what can we hack on between Sawtooth Lake and Fabric. Hack on infrastructure (setting up bots to integrate Slack/Git, etc.).  Starting transition from Travis to Jenkins. WG meetings could happen, too.
  • ChristopherA:  Would like Thursday 10:30am - 12:30pm for Identity WG
  • Ram:  Would like some time on Friday AM for Arch WG.  9am - noon.
  • Dave:  Haven’t talked about F2F for whitepaper WG.  Will reach out to members of WG and circle back.
  • Any further ideas,  please let Chris Ferris know.
  • Draft agenda -- please add comments or suggestions


WG Updates

  • Requirements WG (Patrick Holmes)
  • Architecture WG (Ram Jagadeesan)
    • Met on wednesday.  Most of discussion was around consensus layer and how to isolate that to make it truly modular.
  • Whitepaper WG (Dave Voell)
  • Identity Subgroup (Christopher Allen)
    • No updates (no meeting last week)
  • CI WG (Chris Ferris)
    • Call with LF release engineering team, discussion captured in CI channel on Slack
      • Quality and security is paramount importance.
      • Clear that we likely want to use Gerrit for review process
      • If you adopt Gerrit, you are essentially turning off all commits to Github (as it goes through Gerrit)
      • Then can’t do issue tracking using Github… in which case we adopt Jira or Bugzilla (but, preference was for Jira) -- LF team has great integration between all these tools.
      • Migrating issues out of Github into Jira?  Full automation for this and should be painless.
      • LF team made strong recommendation for Jenkins (even though fabric team using Travis).  Problem with Travis is that it is free and don’t get support. LF can support Jenkins 24/7 -- operate, scale, etc.  Also, Sawtooth Lake is already using Jenkins.
      • Because multiple repos… probably in best interest to start full release integration and release engineering and have FT LF person manning this formally.
      • Wiki -- continue to use Github wiki?  May need to use mediawiki or some other tool.  LF team has experience with this too.