The `pyrmont` testnet has been discontinued.
For experiments, it's still possible to run pyrmont nodes by passing a
genesis/config, but this PR removes the bundled `--network:pyrmont`
option.
* update docs
* remove empty docs
* remove obsolete `eth2-stats` page
rocksdb was never actually used in nimbus-eth2 and existed only to satisfy nim-eth dependencies for test running - these have since moved to nimbus-eth1.
* bump nim-eth
`.era` files and Req/Resp protocols use framed formats - aligning the
database with these makes for less recompression work overall as gossip
is sent only once while req/resp repeats (potentially) - this also
allows efficient pruning-to-era where snappy-recompression is the major
cycle thief.
* harden validator API against pre-finalized slot requests
* check `syncHorizon` when responding to validator api requests too far
from `head`
* limit state-id based requests to one epoch ahead of `head`
* put historic data bounds on block/attestation/etc validator production API, preventing them from being used with already-finalized slots
* add validator block smoke tests
* make rest test create a new genesis with the tests running roughly in
the first epoch to allow testing a few more boundary conditions
* 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>
This extends the `--serve-light-client-data` launch option to serve
locally collected light client data via libp2p.
Backfill of historic best `LightClientUpdate` is not yet implemented.
See https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/pull/2802
During operation as a light client, the chain DAG is not available.
As a preparation, the beacon node initialization logic is divided into
parts depending on the presence of the chain DAG, and parts that are
always available (including a future light client mode).
This is a pure code move without semantic changes.
Gracefully handles the new failure modes recently introduced to the DAG
as part of https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/3513
Data that is deemed to exist but fails to load leads to an error log to
avoid suppressing logic errors accidentally. In `verifyFinalization`
mode, the assertions remain active.
When eliminating orphaned forks, light client data about blocks was also
deleted when the orphaned fork was referring to a state several slots
after the block. Linking light client data pruning with block deletion
instead of state deletion fixes this problem. Light client data always
refers to blocks and their immediate post-state.
When transitioning from light client to full node the chain DAG will be
loaded separately from the rest of the beacon node initialization.
Extracting chain DAG loading to a separate function will allow reusing
a lot of the existing code. This code move doesn't change semantics.
ref loop would stop one block early in this case - trying to load
everything in one loop ends up being pretty confusing..
* simplify finalizedBlocks topup by splitting it from the head loop /
query
When doing checkpoint sync, collecting light client data of known blocks
and states incorrectly assumes that `finalized_checkpoint` information
is also known. Hardens collection to only collect finalized checkpoint
data after `dag.computeEarliestLightClientSlot`.
This file is not actually used / useful - should metadata persistence
support be added in the future, it needs to be done with a new file such
that downgrades, that have the TODO logic unimplemented, don't break.
Witout this, we end up with a massive .wal file that needs to be
checkpointed on first startup (which takes a few minutes) - it's much
more efficient to do smaller checkpoints, it turns out.
Recently, block processing times have been going up as the network grows
making early attestation riskier. Since blocks are big and attestations
are small (though numerous and therefore bandwidth-intense), it seems
better to wait a little bit longer after receiving a block, before we
publish the attestation.
Adds `LightClientProcessor` as the pendant to `BlockProcessor` while
operating in light client mode. Note that a similar mechanism based on
async futures is used for interoperability with existing infrastructure,
despite light client object validation being done synchronously.