honeycombOS v0.1.1 on the ROCK64, GoShimmer and Coordicide

By bernardo rodrigues Last updated Mar 2, 2020

As already introduced in a previous article, honeycombOS is an Embedded Linux Distribution tailored for IOTA nodes, clients and Tangle related tools. It is is part of my work on meta-iota, supported by the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund.

I’m happy to announce the release of honeycombOS v0.1.1! Amongst the new features we can list:

New utility packages installed by default: screen, tmux,cron, man, htop.
Python support packages installed by default: pip , setuptools . Now Python (2 and 3) packages can be installed via pip and pip3.
hornet_update_snapshot does not require sudo anymore, and now it points to https://ls.manapotion.io/
Hornet can now be executed as a systemd service.
wlan0 is enabled on boot for Raspberry Pis 3 and 4 (no need to ifup)

But the most important feature of honeycombOS v0.1.1 deserves special attention. We saw recently that the Coordicide Alphanet has been launched, so in order to help accelerate the Coordicide efforts, it makes sense to include GoShimmer support on honeycombOS.

With honeycombOS, I want to lower the amount of human effort required to run an IOTA Node to the bare minimal. In that context, it’s interesting to shed a light into Autopeering. That’s because without Autopeering, in order to run an IOTA node (IRI, Hornet or cIRI) you need to put a lot of effort into searching for neighbors, actively communicating with their admins to exchange metadata information, and properly setting up the config file before starting the node. This whole process can be cumbersome, and if you don’t have many neighbors and all of them shut down at the same time, you’re totally disconnected from the network.

Autopeering is a major cornerstone of Coordicide and one of the most important features of GoShimmer. In practical terms, it means there’s no human search for neighbors. Unless you want to tweak specific parameters of your node, you don’t really need to ever touch the configuration file. The only significant technical effort is making sure ports 14666 and 14626 (TCP+UDP) are open on your router.

Although there’s still more things to be simplified on honeycombOS UI/UX, GoShimer’s Autopeering significantly lowers the technical barrier for running IOTA Nodes. Less effort means more adoption, more available nodes and overall higher Bandwidth / TPS for everyone. Also, more nodes means more valuable feedback for IF devs to verify and improve GoShimmer’s performance, bringing Coordicide closer in the horizon.

ROCK64

The first honeycombOS release was only tested on Raspberry Pis. Since then, I have been receiving some requests to support the ROCK64 board.

Although I’m focusing this article on the ROCK64, you should also be able to run GoShimmer with honeycombOS on the Raspberry Pis 3 and 4. Conversely, you can also run Hornet on the ROCK64 and the RPis.

According to the official PINE64 website: