* era: load blocks and states
Era files contain finalized history and can be thought of as an
alternative source for block and state data that allows clients to avoid
syncing this information from the P2P network - the P2P network is then
used to "top up" the client with the most recent data. They can be
freely shared in the community via whatever means (http, torrent, etc)
and serve as a permanent cold store of consensus data (and, after the
merge, execution data) for history buffs and bean counters alike.
This PR gently introduces support for loading blocks and states in two
cases: block requests from rest/p2p and frontfilling when doing
checkpoint sync.
The era files are used as a secondary source if the information is not
found in the database - compared to the database, there are a few key
differences:
* the database stores the block indexed by block root while the era file
indexes by slot - the former is used only in rest, while the latter is
used both by p2p and rest.
* when loading blocks from era files, the root is no longer trivially
available - if it is needed, it must either be computed (slow) or cached
(messy) - the good news is that for p2p requests, it is not needed
* in era files, "framed" snappy encoding is used while in the database
we store unframed snappy - for p2p2 requests, the latter requires
recompression while the former could avoid it
* front-filling is the process of using era files to replace backfilling
- in theory this front-filling could happen from any block and
front-fills with gaps could also be entertained, but our backfilling
algorithm cannot take advantage of this because there's no (simple) way
to tell it to "skip" a range.
* front-filling, as implemented, is a bit slow (10s to load mainnet): we
load the full BeaconState for every era to grab the roots of the blocks
- it would be better to partially load the state - as such, it would
also be good to be able to partially decompress snappy blobs
* lookups from REST via root are served by first looking up a block
summary in the database, then using the slot to load the block data from
the era file - however, there needs to be an option to create the
summary table from era files to fully support historical queries
To test this, `ncli_db` has an era file exporter: the files it creates
should be placed in an `era` folder next to `db` in the data directory.
What's interesting in particular about this setup is that `db` remains
as the source of truth for security purposes - it stores the latest
synced head root which in turn determines where a node "starts" its
consensus participation - the era directory however can be freely shared
between nodes / people without any (significant) security implications,
assuming the era files are consistent / not broken.
There's lots of future improvements to be had:
* we can drop the in-memory `BlockRef` index almost entirely - at this
point, resident memory usage of Nimbus should drop to a cool 500-600 mb
* we could serve era files via REST trivially: this would drop backfill
times to whatever time it takes to download the files - unlike the
current implementation that downloads block by block, downloading an era
at a time almost entirely cuts out request overhead
* we can "reasonably" recreate detailed state history from almost any
point in time, turning an O(slot) process into O(1) effectively - we'll
still need caches and indices to do this with sufficient efficiency for
the rest api, but at least it cuts the whole process down to minutes
instead of hours, for arbitrary points in time
* CI: ignore failures with Nim-1.6 (temporary)
* test fixes
Co-authored-by: Ștefan Talpalaru <stefantalpalaru@yahoo.com>
* add EF fork choice tests to CI
* checkpoints
* compilation fixes and add test to preset dependent suite
* support longpaths on Windows CI
* skip minimal tests (long paths issue + impl detals tested)
* fix stackoverflow on some platforms
* rebase on top of https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/3054
* fix stack usage
* Logging and startup improvements
Color support for released binaries!
* startup scripts no longer log to file by default - this only affects
source builds - released binaries don't support file logging
* add --log-stdout option to control logging to stdout (colors, json)
* detect tty:s vs redirected logs and log accordingly
* add option to disable log colors at runtime
* simplify several "common" logs, showing the most important information
earlier and more clearly
* remove line numbers / file information / tid - these take up space and
are of little use to end users
* still enabled in debug builds and tools
* remove `testnet_servers_image` compile-time option
* server images, released binaries and compile-from-source now offer
the same behaviour and features
* fixes https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/issues/2326
* fixes https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/issues/1794
* remove instanteneous block speed from sync message, keeping only
average
before:
```
INF 2021-10-28 16:45:59.000+02:00 Slot start topics="beacnde" tid=386429 file=nimbus_beacon_node.nim:884 lastSlot=2384027 wallSlot=2384028 delay=461us84ns peers=0 head=75a10ee5:3348 headEpoch=104 finalized=cd6804ba:3264 finalizedEpoch=102 sync="wwwwwwwwww:0:0.0000:0.0000:00h00m (3348)"
INF 2021-10-28 16:45:59.046+02:00 Slot end topics="beacnde" tid=386429 file=nimbus_beacon_node.nim:821 slot=2384028 nextSlot=2384029 head=75a10ee5:3348 headEpoch=104 finalizedHead=cd6804ba:3264 finalizedEpoch=102 nextAttestationSlot=-1 nextProposalSlot=-1 nextActionWait=n/a
```
after:
```
INF 2021-10-28 22:43:23.033+02:00 Slot start topics="beacnde" slot=2385815 epoch=74556 sync="DDPDDPUDDD:10:5.2258:01h19m (2361088)" peers=37 head=eacd2dae:2361096 finalized=73782:a4751487 delay=33ms687us715ns
INF 2021-10-28 22:43:23.291+02:00 Slot end topics="beacnde" slot=2385815 nextActionWait=n/a nextAttestationSlot=-1 nextProposalSlot=-1 head=eacd2dae:2361096
```
* fix comment
* documentation updates
* mention `--log-file` may be deprecated in the future
* update various docs
This updates the publish-unit-test-result integration with support for
pull requests coming from forked repositories. The update changes the
behaviour so that (a) unit test results are displayed as a comment, and
(b) macOS and Windows builds no longer time out during the CI action.
The official guide for the publish-unit-test-result action has been
followed for this purpose. See the official readme at:
https://github.com/EnricoMi/publish-unit-test-result-action/blob/v1.23/README.md#support-fork-repositories-and-dependabot-branches
* "official" -> "scenarios", like the submodule
* fewer test binaries - various compile hacks have been improved over
time, test suite should follow
* remove obsolete bls tests - there are better test vectors in
nim-blscurve
* remove obsolete mentions of `ssz_testing`
* remove obsolete comments about proc vs globals, unittest2 already uses
proc's
* Introduce unittest2 and junit reports
* fix XML path
* don't combine multiple CI runs
* fixup
* public combined report also
Co-authored-by: Ștefan Talpalaru <stefantalpalaru@yahoo.com>
Nikolay Mitev
Zahary Karadjov
tersec
zah
Jacek Sieka
Ștefan Talpalaru
Mamy Ratsimbazafy
Etan Kissling