Release Notes - v0.207.4

v0.207.4

Title: Improve protocol pipelining and witness validation

Version: v0.207.4

This release improves protocol pipelining, rejects malformed Conway and Byron witnesses earlier, and refines when benchmark checks run.

Bug Fixes

• Improved message sequencing during protocol pipelining by keeping connection state aligned with readiness signals, checking queued messages after delayed state transitions complete, retaining held messages, and validating every message in a batch. Legitimate state advancement no longer causes fatal connection shutdowns, and ChainSync MsgRequestNext requests can be sent back to back before replies arrive.
• Rejected Conway transactions when witness set fields 0 through 7 appeared explicitly but empty during CBOR decoding, while preserving valid absent fields and zero value witness set encoding. Malformed transactions therefore fail earlier.
• Updated benchmark checks to run for published releases, manual requests, and authorized /benchmark comments instead of every push to main.
• Hardened Byron witness validation by rejecting unsupported constructors, including constructor 3, and requiring exact key and signature lengths for constructors 0 and 2. Validation now rejects malformed transaction and block witnesses.

Release: v0.207.4

Compare: v0.207.3…v0.207.4

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Docs authored by Doc Holiday