[tor-relays] Upcoming Stabilization of Tor 0.4.9.x

[Alexander Hansen Færøy via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Tor Relay Operators!

The Network Team, particularly David Goulet, is preparing to mark the Tor 
0.4.9.x series stable. It will likely happen in the next few weeks, assuming 
that we don't run into trouble with the the 0.4.9.4-rc release that comes out 
this week (along with a probably-final update to 0.4.8). We hope you folks will 
update quickly, and provide the feedback we need, as you always do.

Once Tor 0.4.9.x is released as stable, and is available in your package 
management system, we urge the relay operator community to begin this 
transition, particularly by adopting the Happy Family system included in this 
release. For more information, please check out the documentation[2]. At first, 
we will need you to co-maintain both the existing `MyFamily` system and Happy 
Families in parallel. If the network upgrade goes quickly, we hope to deprecate 
the `MyFamily` system sooner rather than later. This period, when both family 
systems coexist, will be painful, particularly for our Apple iOS users, due to 
the memory limitations of their Network Extension API. Once we can get rid of 
the `MyFamily` system, we expect our directory traffic and memory utilization to 
drop, which will hopefully make Tor more usable for these users and other users 
on lower-memory systems. In addition to the memory and traffic issues, we also 
want to acknowledge the pain points raised by the large operators, who currently 
need to partition their `MyFamily` settings into multiple logical subsets to 
avoid exceeding the max descriptor sizes we have in place to mitigate DoS.

To use Happy Families, operators using `ansible-relayor`[1] should already have 
Happy Family key management support in the upstream project's GitHub repository. 
For everybody else, please have a look at the documentation[2] for more 
information on configuring Happy Families for your relays. Feel free to reach 
out here for assistance. Relay operators running a single relay where they 
currently don't set the `MyFamily` setting won't have to worry about Happy 
Families at all.

Later this year, the Network Team + Network Health Team will have a blog post 
out on the current status of the Arti Relay project and how we foresee the 
remaining lifetime of C Tor. Happy Families was a bit of a special feature, as 
there was an urgent need for it, but it also lets us ignore the `MyFamily` 
system when building Arti Relay.

Thanks! And I hope to see some of you at the Relay Operator Meetup[3] at FOSDEM 
in the upcoming weekend!

Cheers,
Alex

[1]: https://github.com/nusenu/ansible-relayor
[2]: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/post-install/family-ids/
[3]: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DRMMAB-tor_relay_operator_meetup/
--
Alexander Hansen Færøy

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