This commit introduces two new functions for MsgBlock and MsgTx named
Serialize and Deserialize. The functions provide a stable mechanism for
serializing and deserializing blocks and transactions to and from disk
without having to worry about the protocol version. Instead these
functions use the Version fields in the blocks and transactions.
These new functions differ from BtcEncode and BtcDecode in that the latter
functions are intended to encode/decode blocks and transaction from the
wire which technically can differ depending on the protocol version and
don't even really need to use the same format as the stored data.
Currently, there is no difference between the two, and due to how
intertwined they are in the reference implementaiton, they may not ever
diverge, but there is a difference and the goal for btcwire is to provide
a stable API that is flexible enough to deal with encoding changes.
Fix error returns in InsertBlock and FetchBlockBySha
Give up on return by name in InsertBlock() and return explicit
err one location in FetchBlockBySha to return proper error value
This commit adds a new optional function named GenerateInitialIndex. It
generates the required number of initial block nodes in an optimized
fashion. Since the memory block index is sparse and previous nodes are
dynamically loaded as needed, this function is not stricty needed.
However, during initial startup (when there are no nodes in memory yet),
dynamically loading all of the required nodes on the fly in the usual way
is much slower than preloading them.
The recent pruning code made the parent hash for a node available directly
as a field in the node. Make use of this in the getPrevNodeFromNode
function to avoid having to load the full block data associated with the
node to get the parent hash.
This commit implements pruning for the block nodes that form the memory
chain which are no longer needed. The validation of a block only requires
information from a set number of previous nodes. The initial code did not
prune old nodes as they were no longer needed, but the vast majority of
the infrastructure to support it was already in place as that was always
the goal. This commit finishes implementing the missing bits to make it
a reality.
Previously, the code was using big rational numbers for work values which
resulted in carrying way too much precision around (and ultimately a lot
of extra memory and computation to carry that precision). This commit
converts the work values to big integers and calculates them with integer
division. This is acceptable because the numerator is multiplied by 2^256
which is higher than the maximum possible proof of work. Therefore
anything after the decimal is superfluous precision for the purposes of
chain selection.
Also, add a check for negative difficulty values when calculating the work
value. Negative values won't occur in practice with valid blocks, but
it's possible an invalid block could trigger the code path, so be safe and
check for it.
Previously the main network checkpoints were being used for unrecognized
networks. This commit changes the code so that no checkpoints are used in
that scenario.
Rather than converting the proof of work limit to its compact
representation multiple times during operation, do it once at package
initialization time and export it via the chain parameters.
This commit adds info level log statements when a block causes a chain
fork, extends a side chain (fork), or causes a reorganize. When a reorg
happens, the new and old chain heads along with the fork point are logged.
Even though the code currently makes heavy use of nodes which will have
the appropriate height, blocks which did not come from the database will
not have a height set. As a result, this could possibly result in a
height of 0 being used when unintended. By setting the block height in
the block as soon as its known (regardless of the source), we can future
proof against bugs that would likely be hard to track down.
The btcscript API for GetSigOpCount and GetPreciseSigOpCount
recently changed to no longer return an error. This change was necessary
to mirror the behavior of bitcoind signature operations counting. This
commit modifies the code accordingly to use the new API.
We do this by allowing the parser to return the list of parsed objects
(it is an internal only api anyway) and then we use this in the sigops
counting and ignore the error. This change due to bitcoind
compatability.
It is acceptable for a transaction input in a block to reference the
output of another transaction in the same block only if the referenced
transaction comes before the transaction referencing it.
This commit modifies the way initial database creation is handled.
Previously, the genesis for the main chain was inserted automatically upon
creation of the database. However, that approach caused an issue since
other networks such as the test network don't use the same genesis block
as the main network.
The new approach introduced by this commit is to leave it up to the caller
to insert the desired genesis block. In order to support this, the
InsertBlock function has been modified to allow the first (and only the
first) block to be inserted without having an existing parent. Also, the
NewestSha function has been modified to return a zero hash, -1 for the
height, and no error when the database does not yet have any blocks. This
allows the caller to determine the difference between no blocks and only
the genesis block (in which case the return values would be the genesis
hash and 0 for the height).
The go vet command complains about untagged struct initializers when
defining a ShaHash directly. This seems to be a limitation where go vet
does not exclude the warning for types which are a constant size byte array
like it does for normal constant size byte array definition.
This commit simply modifies the tests to use a constant definition cast to a
ShaHash to overcome the limitation of go vet.
