This is a rather monolithic commit that moves the old RPC server to
its own package (rpc/legacyrpc), introduces a new RPC server using
gRPC (rpc/rpcserver), and provides the ability to defer wallet loading
until request at a later time by an RPC (--noinitialload).
The legacy RPC server remains the default for now while the new gRPC
server is not enabled by default. Enabling the new server requires
setting a listen address (--experimenalrpclisten). This experimental
flag is used to effectively feature gate the server until it is ready
to use as a default. Both RPC servers can be run at the same time,
but require binding to different listen addresses.
In theory, with the legacy RPC server now living in its own package it
should become much easier to unit test the handlers. This will be
useful for any future changes to the package, as compatibility with
Core's wallet is still desired.
Type safety has also been improved in the legacy RPC server. Multiple
handler types are now used for methods that do and do not require the
RPC client as a dependency. This can statically help prevent nil
pointer dereferences, and was very useful for catching bugs during
refactoring.
To synchronize the wallet loading process between the main package
(the default) and through the gRPC WalletLoader service (with the
--noinitialload option), as well as increasing the loose coupling of
packages, a new wallet.Loader type has been added. All creating and
loading of existing wallets is done through a single Loader instance,
and callbacks can be attached to the instance to run after the wallet
has been opened. This is how the legacy RPC server is associated with
a loaded wallet, even after the wallet is loaded by a gRPC method in a
completely unrelated package.
Documentation for the new RPC server has been added to the
rpc/documentation directory. The documentation includes a
specification for the new RPC API, addresses how to make changes to
the server implementation, and provides short example clients in
several different languages.
Some of the new RPC methods are not implementated exactly as described
by the specification. These are considered bugs with the
implementation, not the spec. Known bugs are commented as such.
Logging from btcrpcclient is currently not possible to set, and defaults
to nothing. Letting it inherit chain's logger can greatly simplify
debugging of connectivity issues.
Also remove a now redundant log message upon connecting to btcd.
This change introduces additional network activity with the btcd
process to ensure that the network connection is not silently dropped.
Previously, if the connection was lost (e.g. wallet runs on a laptop
and connects to remote btcd, and the laptop is suspended/resumed) the
lost connection would not be detectable since all normal RPC activity
(excluding requests from btcwallet to btcd made by the user) is in the
direction of btcd to wallet in the form of websocket notifications.
btcrpcclient commit 9ca93b30ad11ec34348d2d788c58019571bf9524 switched
the client to btcjson v2 and broke the wallet build. This change is
the minimum amount of work to make wallet work again.
The rpc server still uses btcjson v1, so there will be 2 versions of
btcjson linked in the resulting binary. This is not optimal but not
compiling is worse.
Otherwise, if the websocket connection to btcd is lost and
reestablished, there is no sync to the current best block, and btcd
will not notify wallet of new relevant transactions.
This commit converts the wallet to use the new secure hierarchical
deterministic wallet address manager package as well as the walletdb
package.
The following is an overview of modified functionality:
- The wallet must now be created before starting the executable
- A new flag --create has been added to create the new wallet using wizard
style question and answer prompts
- Starting the process without an existing wallet will instruct now
display a message to run it with --create
- Providing the --create flag with an existing wallet will simply show an
error and return
In addition the snacl package has been modified to return the memory after
performing scrypt operations to the OS.
Previously a runtime.GC was being invoked which forced it to release the
memory as far as the garbage collector is concerned, but the memory was
not released back to the OS immediatley. This modification allows the
memory to be released immedately since it won't be needed again until the
next wallet unlock.
This commit introduces a new flag, --noclienttls, which can be used to disable
TLS for the RPC client. However, the flag can only be used when the RPC
client is connecting to localhost interfaces. This is intended to prevent
accidentally leaking sensitive data when switching between local and
remote servers.
The notified chain server connection state was being passed through
the wallet and then notified to the RPC server, which prevented this
notification from ever firing if a wallet didn't exist yet. Instead,
make the RPC server register for these notifications directly from the
chain server RPC client.
I'm not happy with this notification and how it's handled in the code,
but to not break existing clients this change is being made. Fixing
the notifiation mess and modifying existing clients to use a new
notification API will need to be done sometime later.
If a websocket client was already connected and the wallet and/or
chain server is loaded into the rpc server (enabling the handlers
specific to those components), the btcdconnected notifications were
not being sent, and this could break clients that expected the
notification. I'm not happy with this change, but since this is how
notifications are currently done (unsolicited), and to not break
compatibility yet, I'm adding these back in for now.
Eventually, this notification will require explicit registration
before it is received by a client. See issue #84.
Closes#115.
This commit is the result of several big changes being made to the
wallet. In particular, the "handshake" (initial sync to the chain
server) was quite racy and required proper synchronization. To make
fixing this race easier, several other changes were made to the
internal wallet data structures and much of the RPC server ended up
being rewritten.
First, all account support has been removed. The previous Account
struct has been replaced with a Wallet structure, which includes a
keystore for saving keys, and a txstore for storing relevant
transactions. This decision has been made since it is the opinion of
myself and other developers that bitcoind accounts are fundamentally
broken (as accounts implemented by bitcoind support both arbitrary
address groupings as well as moving balances between accounts -- these
are fundamentally incompatible features), and since a BIP0032 keystore
is soon planned to be implemented (at which point, "accounts" can
return as HD extended keys). With the keystore handling the grouping
of related keys, there is no reason have many different Account
structs, and the AccountManager has been removed as well. All RPC
handlers that take an account option will only work with "" (the
default account) or "*" if the RPC allows specifying all accounts.
Second, much of the RPC server has been cleaned up. The global
variables for the RPC server and chain server client have been moved
to part of the rpcServer struct, and the handlers for each RPC method
that are looked up change depending on which components have been set.
Passthrough requests are also no longer handled specially, but when
the chain server is set, a handler to perform the passthrough will be
returned if the method is not otherwise a wallet RPC. The
notification system for websocket clients has also been rewritten so
wallet components can send notifications through channels, rather than
requiring direct access to the RPC server itself, or worse still,
sending directly to a websocket client's send channel. In the future,
this will enable proper registration of notifications, rather than
unsolicited broadcasts to every connected websocket client (see
issue #84).
Finally, and the main reason why much of this cleanup was necessary,
the races during intial sync with the chain server have been fixed.
Previously, when the 'Handshake' was run, a rescan would occur which
would perform modifications to Account data structures as
notifications were received. Synchronization was provided with a
single binary semaphore which serialized all access to wallet and
account data. However, the Handshake itself was not able to run with
this lock (or else notifications would block), and many data races
would occur as both notifications were being handled. If GOMAXPROCS
was ever increased beyond 1, btcwallet would always immediately crash
due to invalid addresses caused by the data races on startup. To fix
this, the single lock for all wallet access has been replaced with
mutexes for both the keystore and txstore. Handling of btcd
notifications and client requests may now occur simultaneously.
GOMAXPROCS has also been set to the number of logical CPUs at the
beginning of main, since with the data races fixed, there's no reason
to prevent the extra parallelism gained by increasing it.
Closes#78.
Closes#101.
Closes#110.
