Chimera v.0.8 Release update

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• The main update in this version is the addition of ChimeraState structure and using it through out the library. The ChimeraState is the state holder for different chimera modules. In previous version we were using global variables in various layers for developing simplicity. All the previous global variables are replaced by ChimeraState which also caused many changes to various function definitions. Thus if you have a working application developed on version 0.7 you might need to change some of the function calls. For more details about the function definition please see the  "Chimera Architecture & API" or chimera doxygen document. 
• In chimera version 0.8 we fixed the key length problem in function str_to_key(char *str, Key *k) that user had to make sure that the string input be exactly 40 characters long. Now the function takes any size string and if its shorter than 40 characters it is left-padded with 0s and if its longer than 40 characters it is trimmed to 40 left most significants.
• Another bug fixed was the leaf set exchange that used to add all the receiving updates regardless if the new node is already in the routing table or not. This was causing many fake chimera_update_upcall which was not informing the higher layer application about a new node, but a node that just re-added while existed.
• We also added a doxygen documentation of chimera that can be found in <chimera_folder>/docs/html/index.html
• Other than the test.c that is a very simple application to show how to develop application on top of chimera overlay, in this version we also included one of our test beds. The test main file is "bigtest.c" that can be found under <chimera_folder>/test/.  The bigtest uses "bighost.c" which is very similar to test.c chat application. To run bigtest.c first create a set of random keys from "sha1_keygen #keys hostname" and save them to a file called hosts. then run bigtest.
  Bigtest calls bighost and create the network and pick a random source from hosts and random destination from key space and route message from source to destination. It also output the logs than can be parsed to create the graph to see the average hop count.
  
  
   
    Rama Alebouyeh
  
    Last updated  11/11/05