Will Armory 0.96.4 continue to work with on Bitcoin Core 0.21.0?

[pf]

I currently have Armory 0.96.4 and Bitcoin Core 0.18.0.

Everything is fine and smooth.

1. If I upgrade to Bitcoin Core 0.21.0, will Armory 0.96.4 continue working fine? (Both online and airgapped)

2. (Not Armory question) Are there any reasons to even upgrade to Bitcoin Core 0.21.0? What are the benefits? I'm just a HODLer and I make just a few transactions every year.

[HCP]

I currently have Armory 0.96.4 and Bitcoin Core 0.18.0.

Everything is fine and smooth.

1. If I upgrade to Bitcoin Core 0.21.0, will Armory 0.96.4 continue working fine? (Both online and airgapped)

I'm kinda tempted to say "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"... If everything is currently "fine and smooth"... then you might be better off just leaving it "as is"... there haven't been any "breaking changes" to Bitcoin Core... so 0.18 will quite happily continue to work with the network (as things currently stand).

2. (Not Armory question) Are there any reasons to even upgrade to Bitcoin Core 0.21.0? What are the benefits? I'm just a HODLer and I make just a few transactions every year.

You'd need to read the release notes of the versions after 0.18.0 up to 0.21.0 and see what changes have been made and what vulnerabilities have been addressed and assess whether or not they offer any benefit to you.

There have been a number of changes and additions... but that doesn't necessarily mean "better" for your particular use case.

[Carlton Banks]

FWIW, I've been using 0.20.1 with Armory 0.96.5, all is well.

I will try 0.21.0 sometime soon, I didn't notice anything in the release notes that ought to break interoperability, but I always have backed up data regardless.

[goatpig]

Changes in the P2P layer are backwards compatible nd no existing calls are really ever deprecated (this is only relevant when commands are replaced over security concerns). It's a (somewhat) service based handshake so that part will probably never really break compatibility with Armory.

The on-disk format probably won't ever change, there isn't much room to gain there, it's simpler for Core to keep it as a raw block data dump. Put another way it's unlikely Core updates will break Armory compatibility, more like they'll introduce new stuff I'll have to catch up to.

[Carlton Banks]

...quick confirmation: tried 0.21.0 with Armory 0.96.5, works entirely as before