QUB Core v1.8.4 HF128 — Mining and Network Liveness

HF128 is a mandatory, non-consensus reliability release built on the HF123 Fast Chain Engine, HF124 mining liveness, HF125 acknowledged block delivery, HF126 equal-height recovery and HF127 reliable transaction delivery.

Network identity

• No chain upgrade and no new activation height.
• Protocol Epoch 2 remains at mainnet block #24000.
• Post-activation block version remains 2.
• P2P protocol remains 2.
• Fast Chain Engine remains QUB-FCE-1.
• Block/transaction hashes, PoW, DAA, rewards, checkpoints, pools, QUB and JIN validation rules are unchanged.

HF128 highlights

• Restores the pre-HF127 automatic 100% CPU saturation plan: two disjoint nonce lanes per logical CPU, with no fixed worker cap.
• Makes the GPU percentage a real measured active/idle duty independent of stable per-device batch tuning; 100% dispatches continuously.
• Applies changed mining controls to active workers through an acknowledged stop/restart generation and reports applied rather than desired power.
• Splits oversized OpenCL work into continuous interruptible dispatches and corrects CPU/GPU hashrate and cumulative telemetry across round changes.
• Removes the pool-wide QUB Melt deadlock through a backward-compatible, markerless POOLCOMPAT1 template policy accepted by unchanged HF127 nodes.
• Bootstraps an empty PPLNS window from valid pending shares, so a solo miner is no longer required to start or restart pool mining.
• Replaces handshake-from-genesis floods with one staged suffix/overlap request, preserves HF127 protocol-2 count-window framing, rejects self-alias connections and deduplicates seed evidence by persisted node ID.
• Queues manual Sync/Repair behind an active auto-catchup instead of dropping it.
• Loads Explorer API chain data and its exact FCE commit identity atomically.
• Repairs Windows update staging, timeout, SHA-256, error and installer-result handling.

Pool compatibility policy

POOLCOMPAT1 is a diagnostic/template tag only. It deliberately does not match the consensus POOLBLOCK1 parser. It is used only when a legacy marked pool block would be impossible (QUB Melt) or when valid pending shares must bootstrap an empty confirmed window. QUB payouts remain deterministic. Native-JIN-fee transactions wait for the next ordinary marked pool block.

Operator commands retained

qubd --config <config> status-fast
qubd --config <config> storage-stats
qubd --config <config> validate
qubd --config <config> sync
qubd --config <config> peers
qubd --config <config> tx-delivery-status [txid]
qubd --config <config> relay-pending-txs

Release documentation

• RELEASE_NOTES-v1.8.4-HF128.md
• HF128-v184-RELIABILITY-REVIEW.md
• HF128-v184-DEPLOY-RUNBOOK.md
• README-FAST-CHAIN-ENGINE.md
• README-RPC-MINER.md

Runtime image/audio/font assets are intentionally omitted from source-only packages. Copy the known-good deployed assets into assets/ before building the Windows GUI distribution.