Post-Capella, historical roots are computed from historical summaries
instead of being directly stored in the beacon state.
Slightly messy to pass both lists around - this is done to avoid
computing the historical root unnecessarily.
In SSZ, `uint32` is used for offsets, effectively limiting the size of
an SSZ entry to 2**32 bytes.
Also, `uint48` isn't a valid SSZ type, so the header was not correctly
defined according to the SSZ spec - the extra 2 bytes are left for
future expansion instead.
* era file verification
Implement and document era file verification
* era file states now come with block applied for easier verification
* clarify conflicting version handling
* document verification requirements
* remove count from name, use start-era, end-root to discover range
* remove obsolete todo
* abstract out block root loading
This PR makes the necessary adjustments to deal with the revamped snappy
API.
In practical terms for nimbus-eth2, there are performance increases to
gossip processing, database reading and writing as well as era file
processing. Exporting `.era` files for example, a snappy-heavy
operation, almost halves in total processing time:
Pre:
```
Average, StdDev, Min, Max, Samples, Test
39.088, 8.735, 23.619, 53.301, 50, tState
237.079, 46.692, 165.620, 355.481, 49, tBlocks
```
Post:
```
All time are ms
Average, StdDev, Min, Max, Samples, Test
25.350, 5.303, 15.351, 41.856, 50, tState
141.238, 24.164, 99.990, 199.329, 49, tBlocks
```
`.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.
* 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>
Overhaul of era files, including documentation and reference
implementations
* store blocks, then state, then slot indices for easy lookup at low
cost
* document era file rationale
* altair+ support in era writer
* reorganize ssz dependencies
This PR continues the work in
https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/2646,
https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/2779 as well as past
issues with serialization and type, to disentangle SSZ from eth2 and at
the same time simplify imports and exports with a structured approach.
The principal idea here is that when a library wants to introduce SSZ
support, they do so via 3 files:
* `ssz_codecs` which imports and reexports `codecs` - this covers the
basic byte conversions and ensures no overloads get lost
* `xxx_merkleization` imports and exports `merkleization` to specialize
and get access to `hash_tree_root` and friends
* `xxx_ssz_serialization` imports and exports `ssz_serialization` to
specialize ssz for a specific library
Those that need to interact with SSZ always import the `xxx_` versions
of the modules and never `ssz` itself so as to keep imports simple and
safe.
This is similar to how the REST / JSON-RPC serializers are structured in
that someone wanting to serialize spec types to REST-JSON will import
`eth2_rest_serialization` and nothing else.
* split up ssz into a core library that is independendent of eth2 types
* rename `bytes_reader` to `codec` to highlight that it contains coding
and decoding of bytes and native ssz types
* remove tricky List init overload that causes compile issues
* get rid of top-level ssz import
* reenable merkleization tests
* move some "standard" json serializers to spec
* remove `ValidatorIndex` serialization for now
* remove test_ssz_merkleization
* add tests for over/underlong byte sequences
* fix broken seq[byte] test - seq[byte] is not an SSZ type
There are a few things this PR doesn't solve:
* like #2646 this PR is weak on how to handle root and other
dontSerialize fields that "sometimes" should be computed - the same
problem appears in REST / JSON-RPC etc
* Fix a build problem on macOS
* Another way to fix the macOS builds
Co-authored-by: Zahary Karadjov <zahary@gmail.com>
The spec imports are a mess to work with, so this branch cleans them up
a bit to ensure that we avoid generic sandwitches and that importing
stuff generally becomes easier.
* reexport crypto/digest/presets because these are part of the public
symbol set of the rest of the spec types
* don't export `merge` types from `base` - this causes circular deps
* fix circular deps in `ssz/spec_types` - this is the first step in
disentangling ssz from spec
* be explicit about phase0 vs altair - longer term, `altair` will become
the "natural" type set, then merge and so on, so no point in giving
`phase0` special preferential treatment
Era files contain 8192 blocks and a state corresponding to the length of
the array holding block roots in the state, meaning that each block is
verifiable using the pubkeys and block roots from the state. Of course,
one would need to know the root of the state as well, which is available
in the first block of the _next_ file - or known from outside.
This PR also adds an implementation to write e2s, e2i and era files, as
well as a python script to inspect them.
All in all, the format is very similar to what goes on in the network
requests meaning it can trivially serve as a backing format for serving
said requests.
Mainnet, up to the first 671k slots, take up 3.5gb - in each era file,
the BeaconState contributes about 9mb at current validator set sizes, up
from ~3mb in the early blocks, for a grand total of ~558mb for the 82 eras
tested - this overhead could potentially be calculated but one would lose
the ability to verify individual blocks (eras could still be verified using
historical roots).
```
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 16 5 mar 11.47 ethereum2-mainnet-00000000-00000001.e2i
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 1,8M 5 mar 11.47 ethereum2-mainnet-00000000-00000001.e2s
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 65K 5 mar 11.47 ethereum2-mainnet-00000001-00000001.e2i
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 18M 5 mar 11.47 ethereum2-mainnet-00000001-00000001.e2s
...
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 65K 5 mar 11.52 ethereum2-mainnet-00000051-00000001.e2i
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 68M 5 mar 11.52 ethereum2-mainnet-00000051-00000001.e2s
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 61K 5 mar 11.11 ethereum2-mainnet-00000052-00000001.e2i
-rw-rw-r--. 1 arnetheduck arnetheduck 62M 5 mar 11.11 ethereum2-mainnet-00000052-00000001.e2s
```
Jacek Sieka
tersec
Miran