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This commit is the first stage of several that are planned to convert
the blockchain package into a concurrent safe package that will
ultimately allow support for multi-peer download and concurrent chain
processing. The goal is to update btcd proper after each step so it can
take advantage of the enhancements as they are developed.
In addition to the aforementioned benefit, this staged approach has been
chosen since it is absolutely critical to maintain consensus.
Separating the changes into several stages makes it easier for reviewers
to logically follow what is happening and therefore helps prevent
consensus bugs. Naturally there are significant automated tests to help
prevent consensus issues as well.
The main focus of this stage is to convert the blockchain package to use
the new database interface and implement the chain-related functionality
which it no longer handles. It also aims to improve efficiency in
various areas by making use of the new database and chain capabilities.
The following is an overview of the chain changes:
- Update to use the new database interface
- Add chain-related functionality that the old database used to handle
- Main chain structure and state
- Transaction spend tracking
- Implement a new pruned unspent transaction output (utxo) set
- Provides efficient direct access to the unspent transaction outputs
- Uses a domain specific compression algorithm that understands the
standard transaction scripts in order to significantly compress them
- Removes reliance on the transaction index and paves the way toward
eventually enabling block pruning
- Modify the New function to accept a Config struct instead of
inidividual parameters
- Replace the old TxStore type with a new UtxoViewpoint type that makes
use of the new pruned utxo set
- Convert code to treat the new UtxoViewpoint as a rolling view that is
used between connects and disconnects to improve efficiency
- Make best chain state always set when the chain instance is created
- Remove now unnecessary logic for dealing with unset best state
- Make all exported functions concurrent safe
- Currently using a single chain state lock as it provides a straight
forward and easy to review path forward however this can be improved
with more fine grained locking
- Optimize various cases where full blocks were being loaded when only
the header is needed to help reduce the I/O load
- Add the ability for callers to get a snapshot of the current best
chain stats in a concurrent safe fashion
- Does not block callers while new blocks are being processed
- Make error messages that reference transaction outputs consistently
use <transaction hash>:<output index>
- Introduce a new AssertError type an convert internal consistency
checks to use it
- Update tests and examples to reflect the changes
- Add a full suite of tests to ensure correct functionality of the new
code
The following is an overview of the btcd changes:
- Update to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Temporarily remove all code related to the transaction index
- Temporarily remove all code related to the address index
- Convert all code that uses transaction stores to use the new utxo
view
- Rework several calls that required the block manager for safe
concurrency to use the chain package directly now that it is
concurrent safe
- Change all calls to obtain the best hash to use the new best state
snapshot capability from the chain package
- Remove workaround for limits on fetching height ranges since the new
database interface no longer imposes them
- Correct the gettxout RPC handler to return the best chain hash as
opposed the hash the txout was found in
- Optimize various RPC handlers:
- Change several of the RPC handlers to use the new chain snapshot
capability to avoid needlessly loading data
- Update several handlers to use new functionality to avoid accessing
the block manager so they are able to return the data without
blocking when the server is busy processing blocks
- Update non-verbose getblock to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update getblockheader to request the block height directly from
chain and only load the header
- Update getdifficulty to use the new cached data from chain
- Update getmininginfo to use the new cached data from chain
- Update non-verbose getrawtransaction to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update gettxout to use the new utxo store versus loading
full transactions using the transaction index
The following is an overview of the utility changes:
- Update addblock to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Update findcheckpoint to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Remove the dropafter utility which is no longer supported
NOTE: The transaction index and address index will be reimplemented in
another commit.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| dbnamespace | ||
| stake | ||
| testdata | ||
| accept.go | ||
| bench_test.go | ||
| blocklocator.go | ||
| chain_test.go | ||
| chain.go | ||
| chainio_test.go | ||
| chainio.go | ||
| checkpoints.go | ||
| common_test.go | ||
| common.go | ||
| compress_test.go | ||
| compress.go | ||
| difficulty_test.go | ||
| difficulty.go | ||
| doc.go | ||
| error_test.go | ||
| error.go | ||
| example_test.go | ||
| internal_test.go | ||
| log.go | ||
| mediantime_test.go | ||
| mediantime.go | ||
| merkle_test.go | ||
| merkle.go | ||
| notifications.go | ||
| process.go | ||
| README.md | ||
| reorganization_test.go | ||
| scriptval_test.go | ||
| scriptval.go | ||
| stakeext.go | ||
| subsidy_test.go | ||
| subsidy.go | ||
| ticketlookup.go | ||
| timesorter_test.go | ||
| timesorter.go | ||
| utxoviewpoint.go | ||
| validate_test.go | ||
| validate.go | ||
blockchain
[
]
(https://travis-ci.org/decred/dcrd) ![ISC License]
(http://img.shields.io/badge/license-ISC-blue.svg)
[
]
(http://godoc.org/github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain)
Package blockchain implements decred block handling and chain selection rules.
The test coverage is currently only around 60%, but will be increasing over
time. See test_coverage.txt for the gocov coverage report. Alternatively, if
you are running a POSIX OS, you can run the cov_report.sh script for a
real-time report. Package blockchain is licensed under the liberal ISC license.
There is an associated blog post about the release of this package here.
This package has intentionally been designed so it can be used as a standalone package for any projects needing to handle processing of blocks into the decred block chain.
Installation and Updating
$ go get -u github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain
Decred Chain Processing Overview
Before a block is allowed into the block chain, it must go through an intensive series of validation rules. The following list serves as a general outline of those rules to provide some intuition into what is going on under the hood, but is by no means exhaustive:
- Reject duplicate blocks
- Perform a series of sanity checks on the block and its transactions such as verifying proof of work, timestamps, number and character of transactions, transaction amounts, script complexity, and merkle root calculations
- Compare the block against predetermined checkpoints for expected timestamps and difficulty based on elapsed time since the checkpoint
- Save the most recent orphan blocks for a limited time in case their parent blocks become available
- Stop processing if the block is an orphan as the rest of the processing depends on the block's position within the block chain
- Perform a series of more thorough checks that depend on the block's position within the block chain such as verifying block difficulties adhere to difficulty retarget rules, timestamps are after the median of the last several blocks, all transactions are finalized, checkpoint blocks match, and block versions are in line with the previous blocks
- Determine how the block fits into the chain and perform different actions accordingly in order to ensure any side chains which have higher difficulty than the main chain become the new main chain
- When a block is being connected to the main chain (either through reorganization of a side chain to the main chain or just extending the main chain), perform further checks on the block's transactions such as verifying transaction duplicates, script complexity for the combination of connected scripts, coinbase maturity, double spends, and connected transaction values
- Run the transaction scripts to verify the spender is allowed to spend the coins
- Insert the block into the block database
Examples
-
[ProcessBlock Example] (http://godoc.org/github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain#example-BlockChain-ProcessBlock)
Demonstrates how to create a new chain instance and use ProcessBlock to attempt to attempt add a block to the chain. This example intentionally attempts to insert a duplicate genesis block to illustrate how an invalid block is handled. -
[CompactToBig Example] (http://godoc.org/github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain#example-CompactToBig)
Demonstrates how to convert the compact "bits" in a block header which represent the target difficulty to a big integer and display it using the typical hex notation. -
[BigToCompact Example] (http://godoc.org/github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain#example-BigToCompact)
Demonstrates how to convert how to convert a target difficulty into the compact "bits" in a block header which represent that target difficulty.
License
Package blockchain is licensed under the copyfree ISC License.