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.
This updates the findcheckpoint utility to work when there are not
already any checkpoints. This doesn't really matter for Bitcoin at the
current time, but if a new testnet is created it will not have any
checkpoints to start with and this change also means the utility can
work for alts.
While here, switch a couple of error prints to ensure they contain a
final newline.
Introduce an ECDSA signature verification into btcd in order to
mitigate a certain DoS attack and as a performance optimization.
The benefits of SigCache are two fold. Firstly, usage of SigCache
mitigates a DoS attack wherein an attacker causes a victim's client to
hang due to worst-case behavior triggered while processing attacker
crafted invalid transactions. A detailed description of the mitigated
DoS attack can be found here: https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/fixed-bitcoin-vulnerability-explanation-why-the-signature-cache-is-a-dos-protection/
Secondly, usage of the SigCache introduces a signature verification
optimization which speeds up the validation of transactions within a
block, if they've already been seen and verified within the mempool.
The server itself manages the sigCache instance. The blockManager and
txMempool respectively now receive pointers to the created sigCache
instance. All read (sig triplet existence) operations on the sigCache
will not block unless a separate goroutine is adding an entry (writing)
to the sigCache. GetBlockTemplate generation now also utilizes the
sigCache in order to avoid unnecessarily double checking signatures
when generating a template after previously accepting a txn to the
mempool. Consequently, the CPU miner now also employs the same
optimization.
The maximum number of entries for the sigCache has been introduced as a
config parameter in order to allow users to configure the amount of
memory consumed by this new additional caching.
This commit converts all block height references to int32 instead of
int64. The current target block production rate is 10 mins per block
which means it will take roughly 40,800 years to reach the maximum
height an int32 affords. Even if the target rate were lowered to one
block per minute, it would still take roughly another 4,080 years to
reach the maximum.
In the mean time, there is no reason to use a larger type which results
in higher memory and disk space usage. However, for now, in order to
avoid having to reserialize a bunch of database information, the heights
are still serialized to the database as 8-byte uint64s.
This is being mainly being done in preparation for further upcoming
infrastructure changes which will use the smaller and more efficient
4-byte serialization in the database as well.
This commit modifies the argument handling for btcctl to treat a
parameter that is a single dash as an indicator to read that paramter from
stdin instead.
This change allows commands, such as the submitblock, to accept data piped
from stdin for any parameter. This, in turn, allows large arguments, such
as blocks, which can often be too big for a single argument due to
Operating System limitations to be submitted by putting them into a file
and redirecting stdin.
For example:
btcctl submitblock - <block.hex
cat block.hex | btcctl submitblock -
btcctl sendrawtransaction - <tx.hex
cat tx.hex | btcctl sendrawtransaction -
This commit contains what is essentially a complete rewrite of the btcctl
utility to make use of the new features provided by the latest version
btcjson and improve several things along the way. The following
summarizes the changes:
- The supported commands and handling now come directly from btcjson, so
it is no longer necessary to manually add new commands. Once a command
has been registered with btcjson, it will automatically become usable by
btcctl complete with full error handling (once it is re-compiled of
course)
- Rather than dumping the entire list of commands on every error, the user
now must specifically request the list of command via the -l option
- The list of commands is now categorized by chain and wallet and
alphabetized
- The help flag now only shows the help options instead of also dumping
all of the commands
- The error display on valid commands with invalid parameters has been
greatly improved to show the specific parameter number, reason, and
error code
- When a valid command is specified with invalid parameter, only the usage
for that specific command is shown now
- It is now possible to use a SOCKS5 proxy for connection
- The output of commands has been improved in the following ways:
- Strings on commands such as getbestblockhash no longer have quotes
wrapped around them
- Fields that are integers no longer show in scientific notation when
they are large (timestamps for example)
This closes#305 as a side effect.
* Address index is built up concurrently with the `--addrindex` flag.
* Entire index can be deleted with `--dropaddrindex`.
* New RPC call: `searchrawtransaction`
* Returns all transacitons related to a particular address
* Includes mempool transactions
* Requires `--addrindex` to be activated and fully caught up.
* New `blockLogger` struct has been added to factor our common logging
code
* Wiki and docs updated with new features.
This utility is a relic from initial development before it was possible to
request blocks and transactions via RPC. The correct way to do this now
is by using RPC since that works while btcd is operating unlike the
utility which requires an exclusive lock on the database.
