- testnets can now be launched with a separate validator client - make altona SCRIPT_PARAMS="--separateVC"
- reverted the ctrl+C signal handler code reuse - not necessary for the VC anyway (default is good enough)
- added a bit more logging in the VC
- removed unnecessary code in the VC - connect() just parses the address & port...
- fixed a couple more VC issues - when fetching the duties for an epoch fails on the BN side ==> the VC shouldn't be left in a broken state
- documented the currently supported json-rpc endpoints
- added more checks on the BN side for the API - bounds-checking the requests & also checking if the BN itself is synced
- other cleanup
currently a local sim doesn't finalize, but participation in the altona network with a separate VC is painless and works just as well as with in-process validators in a BN
- better logging & retrying requests on the VC side if the BN fails for some reason
- VC now fetches the attestation duties 1 epoch in advance - in the future it will tell the BN to subscribe to the appropriate attestation topics in advance based on that info
- a bunch of other code cleanup & fixes such as better naming for consoles when using multitail, etc.
reviewed in PR #1184 - proper review of the API & VC are pending
- each BN gets half of its previous validators as inProcess and the other half goes to the respective VC for that BN - using separate data dirs where the keys are copied
- also removed a few command line options which are no longer necessary
- block proposals originating from a VC are propagated from one BN to the rest properly
- other cleanup & moving code back to since it is no longer used elsewhere
- we have a new binary which connects via RPC to the respective BN and has an internal clock - waking it up on every slot
- the BN has a new option called --external-validators and currently in order to have the VC binaries to run we need to pass EXTERNAL_VALIDATORS=yes to make
- factored some code out of beacon_node.nim for easier reuse in validator_api.nim and validator_client.nim
- the VC loads its associated private keys from the datadir for its BN
- most of the validator API calls have been implemented as a stub.
- the VC polls its BN at the start of each epoch - getting a list of all active validators for the current epoch - and then continues to request blocks and sign them with its appropriate validators when necessary
Viktor Kirilov
Zahary Karadjov