The btclog package has been changed to defining its own logging
interface (rather than seelog's) and provides a default implementation
for callers to use.
There are two primary advantages to the new logger implementation.
First, all log messages are created before the call returns. Compared
to seelog, this prevents data races when mutable variables are logged.
Second, the new logger does not implement any kind of artifical rate
limiting (what seelog refers to as "adaptive logging"). Log messages
are outputted as soon as possible and the application will appear to
perform much better when watching standard output.
Because log rotation is not a feature of the btclog logging
implementation, it is handled by the main package by importing a file
rotation package that provides an io.Reader interface for creating
output to a rotating file output. The rotator has been configured
with the same defaults that btcd previously used in the seelog config
(10MB file limits with maximum of 3 rolls) but now compresses newly
created roll files. Due to the high compressibility of log text, the
compressed files typically reduce to around 15-30% of the original
10MB file.
The github markdown interpreter has been changed such that it no longer
allows spaces in between the brackets and parenthesis of links and now
requires a newline in between anchors and other formatting. This
updates all of the markdown files accordingly.
While here, it also corrects a couple of inconsistencies in some of the
README.md files.
This simplifies the code based on the recommendations of the gosimple
lint tool.
Also, it increases the deadline for the linters to run to 10 minutes and
reduces the number of threads that is uses. This is being done because
the Travis environment has become increasingly slower and it also seems
to be hampered by too many threads running concurrently.
This modifies the blockNode and BestState structs in the blockchain
package to store hashes directly instead of pointers to them and updates
callers to deal with the API change in the exported BestState struct.
In general, the preferred approach for hashes moving forward is to store
hash values in complex data structures, particularly those that will be
used for cache entries, and accept pointers to hashes in arguments to
functions.
Some of the reasoning behind making this change is:
- It is generally preferred to avoid storing pointers to data in cache
objects since doing so can easily lead to storing interior pointers
into other structs that then can't be GC'd
- Keeping the hash values directly in the block node provides better
cache locality
This does the minimum work necessary to refactor the CPU miner code into
its own package. The idea is that separating this code into its own
package will improve its testability and ultimately be useful to other
parts of the codebase such as the various tests which currently
effectively have their own stripped-down versions of this code.
The API will certainly need some additional cleanup and changes to make
it more usable outside of the specific circumstances it was originally
designed to support (namely the generate RPC), however it is better to
do that in future commits in order to keep the changeset as small as
possible during this refactor.
Overview of the major changes:
- Create the new package
- Move cpuminer.go -> cpuminer/cpuminer.go
- Update mining logging to use the new cpuminer package logger
- Rename cpuminerConfig to Config (so it's now cpuminer.Config)
- Rename newCPUMiner to New (so it's now cpuminer.New)
- Update all references to the cpuminer to use the package
- Add a skeleton README.md
