Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client for Resource-Restricted Devices

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Rationale

Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client. The code in this repository is currently focusing on Ethereum 1.0 feature parity, while all 2.0 research and development is happening in parallel in nim-beacon-chain.

Development Updates

To keep up to date with changes and development progress, follow the Nimbus blog.

Building & Testing

We currently do not guarantee that Nimbus will work on Windows.

Prerequisites

(On Windows, a precompiled DLL collection download is available through the fetch-dlls Makefile target: (Windows instructions).)

Rocksdb

A recent version of Facebook's RocksDB is needed - it can usually be installed using your system's package manager:

# MacOS with Homebrew
brew install rocksdb

# Fedora
dnf install rocksdb-devel

# Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install librocksdb-dev

# Arch (AUR)
pakku -S rocksdb

You can also build and install it by following their instructions.

PCRE

If you don't already have it, you will also need PCRE to build Nimbus.

# MacOS with Homebrew
brew install pcre

# Fedora
dnf install pcre

# Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

# Arch (AUR)
pakku -S pcre-static

Developer tools

GNU Make, Bash and the usual POSIX utilities. Git 2.9.4 or newer.

Obtaining the prerequisites through the Nix package manager

Experimental

Users of the Nix package manager can install all prerequisites simply by running:

nix-shell default.nix

Build & Develop

POSIX-compatible OS

To build Nimbus (in "build/nimbus"), just execute:

make # The first `make` invocation will update all Git submodules and prompt you to run `make` again.
     # It's only required once per Git clone. You'll run `make update` after each `git pull`, in the future,
     # to keep those submodules up to date.

make nimbus # build the Nimbus binary

Running ./build/nimbus --help will provide you with a list of the available command-line options. To start syncing with mainnet, just execute ./build/nimbus without any parameters.

To execute all tests:

make test

To pull the latest changes in all the Git repositories involved:

git pull
make update

To run a command that might use binaries from the Status Nim fork:

./env.sh bash # start a new interactive shell with the right env vars set
which nim
nim --version

# or without starting a new interactive shell:
./env.sh which nim
./env.sh nim --version

Our Wiki provides additional helpful information for debugging individual test cases and for pairing Nimbus with a locally running copy of Geth.

Windows

(Experimental support!)

Install Mingw-w64 for your architecture using the "MinGW-W64 Online Installer" (first link under the directory listing). Run it and select your architecture in the setup menu ("i686" on 32-bit, "x86_64" on 64-bit), set the threads to "win32" and the exceptions to "dwarf" on 32-bit and "seh" on 64-bit. Change the installation directory to "C:\mingw-w64" and add it to your system PATH in "My Computer"/"This PC" -> Properties -> Advanced system settings -> Environment Variables -> Path -> Edit -> New -> C:\mingw-w64\mingw64\bin (it's "C:\mingw-w64\mingw32\bin" on 32-bit)

Install Git for Windows and use a "Git Bash" shell to clone and build Nimbus.

If you don't want to compile RocksDB and SQLite separately, you can fetch pre-compiled DLLs with:

mingw32-make # this first invocation will update the Git submodules
mingw32-make fetch-dlls # this will place the right DLLs for your architecture in the "build/" directory

You can now follow those instructions in the previous section by replacing make with mingw32-make (regardless of your 32-bit or 64-bit architecture):

mingw32-make nimbus # build the Nimbus binary
mingw32-make test # run the test suite
# etc.

Raspberry PI

Experimental The code can be compiled on a Raspberry PI:

• Raspberry PI 3b+
• 64gb SD Card (less might work too, but the default recommended 4-8GB will probably be too small)
• Rasbian Buster Lite - Lite version is enough to get going and will save some disk space!

Assuming you're working with a freshly written image:

# Start by increasing swap size to 2gb:
sudo vi /etc/dphys-swapfile
# Set CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048
# :wq
sudo reboot

# Install prerequisites
sudo apt-get install git libgflags-dev libsnappy-dev

mkdir status
cd status

# Install rocksdb
git clone https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb.git
cd rocksdb
make shared_lib
sudo make install
cd..

# Raspberry pi doesn't include /usr/local/lib in library search path - need to add
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

git clone https://github.com/status-im/nimbus.git

cd nimbus

# Follow instructions above!

Development tips

• you can switch the DB backend with a Nim compiler define: -d:nimbus_db_backend=... where the (case-insensitive) value is one of "rocksdb" (the default), "sqlite", "lmdb"

• the Premix debugging tools are documented separately

• you can control the Makefile's verbosity with the V variable (defaults to 0):

make V=1 # verbose
make V=2 test # even more verbose

• same for the Chronicles log level:

make LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG nimbus # this is the default
make LOG_LEVEL=TRACE nimbus # log everything

• pass arbitrary parameters to the Nim compiler:

make NIMFLAGS="-d:release"

• if you want to use SSH keys with GitHub (also handles submodules):

make github-ssh

• force a Nim compiler rebuild:

rm vendor/Nim/bin/nim
make -j8 build-nim

Git submodule workflow

Working on a dependency:

cd vendor/nim-chronicles
git checkout -b mybranch
# make some changes
git status
git commit -a
git push origin mybranch
# create a GitHub PR and wait for it to be approved and merged
git checkout master
git pull
git branch -d mybranch
# realise that the merge was done without "--no-ff"
git branch -D mybranch
# update the submodule's commit in the superproject
cd ../..
git status
git add vendor/nim-chronicles
git commit

It's important that you only update the submodule commit after it's available upstream.

You might want to do this on a new branch of the superproject, so you can make a GitHub PR for it and see the CI test results.

Don't update all Git submodules at once, just because you found the relevant Git command or make target. You risk updating submodules to other people's latest commits when they are not ready to be used in the superproject.

Adding the submodule "https://github.com/status-im/foo" to "vendor/foo":

vendor/nimbus-build-system/scripts/add_submodule.sh status-im/foo
# or
./env.sh add_submodule status-im/foo
# want to place it in "vendor/bar" instead?
./env.sh add_submodule status-im/foo vendor/bar

Removing the submodule "vendor/bar":

git submodule deinit -f -- vendor/bar
git rm -f vendor/bar

Checking out older commits, either to bisect something or to reproduce an older build:

git checkout <commit hash here>
make clean
make -j8 update

Running a dependency's test suite using nim instead of nimble (which cannot be convinced not to run a dependency check, thus clashing with our jury-rigged "vendor/.nimble/pkgs"):

cd vendor/nim-rocksdb
../nimbus-build-system/scripts/nimble.sh test
# or
../../env.sh nimble test

Metric visualisation

Install Prometheus and Grafana. On Gentoo, it's emerge prometheus grafana-bin.

# build Nimbus with support for the HTTP endpoint
make NIMFLAGS="-d:insecure" nimbus
# the Prometheus daemon will create its data dir in the current dir, so give it its own directory
mkdir ../my_metrics
# copy the basic config file over there
cp -a examples/prometheus.yml ../my_metrics/
# start Prometheus in a separate terminal
cd ../my_metrics
prometheus # loads ./prometheus.yml, writes metric data to ./data
# start a fresh Nimbus sync and export metrics
rm -rf ~/.cache/nimbus/db; ./build/nimbus --prune:archive --metricsServer

Start the Grafana server. On Gentoo it's /etc/init.d/grafana start. Go to http://localhost:3000, log in with admin:admin and change the password.

Add Prometheus as a data source. The default address of http://localhost:9090 is OK, but Grafana 6.3.5 will not apply that semitransparent default you see in the form field, unless you click on it.

Create a new dashboard. Click on its default title in the upper left corner ("New Dashboard"). In the new page, click "Import dashboard" in the right column and upload "examples/Nimbus-Grafana-dashboard.json".

In the main panel, there's a hidden button used to assign metrics to the left or right Y-axis - it's the coloured line on the left of the metric name, in the graph legend.

To see a single metric, click on its name in the legend. Click it again to go back to the combined view. To edit a panel, click on its title and select "Edit".

Troubleshooting

Report any errors you encounter, please, if not already documented!

• Turn it off and on again:

make clean
make update

License

Licensed and distributed under either of

• MIT license: LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

or

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHEv2 or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option. These files may not be copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.