nimbus-eth2/beacon_chain/consensus_object_pools
Jacek Sieka 61342c2449
limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks (#3293)
* limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks

Presently, we keep a mapping from block root to `BlockRef` in memory -
this has simplified reasoning about the dag, but is not sustainable with
the chain growing.

We can distinguish between two cases where by-root access is useful:

* unfinalized blocks - this is where the beacon chain is operating
generally, by validating incoming data as interesting for future fork
choice decisions - bounded by the length of the unfinalized period
* finalized blocks - historical access in the REST API etc - no bounds,
really

In this PR, we limit the by-root block index to the first use case:
finalized chain data can more efficiently be addressed by slot number.

Future work includes:

* limiting the `BlockRef` horizon in general - each instance is 40
bytes+overhead which adds up - this needs further refactoring to deal
with the tail vs state problem
* persisting the finalized slot-to-hash index - this one also keeps
growing unbounded (albeit slowly)

Anyway, this PR easily shaves ~128mb of memory usage at the time of
writing.

* No longer honor `BeaconBlocksByRoot` requests outside of the
non-finalized period - previously, Nimbus would generously return any
block through this libp2p request - per the spec, finalized blocks
should be fetched via `BeaconBlocksByRange` instead.
* return `Opt[BlockRef]` instead of `nil` when blocks can't be found -
this becomes a lot more common now and thus deserves more attention
* `dag.blocks` -> `dag.forkBlocks` - this index only carries unfinalized
blocks from now - `finalizedBlocks` covers the other `BlockRef`
instances
* in backfill, verify that the last backfilled block leads back to
genesis, or panic
* add backfill timings to log
* fix missing check that `BlockRef` block can be fetched with
`getForkedBlock` reliably
* shortcut doppelganger check when feature is not enabled
* in REST/JSON-RPC, fetch blocks without involving `BlockRef`

* fix dag.blocks ref
2022-01-21 13:33:16 +02:00
..
README.md update from phase0/altair v1.1.6 URLs to v1.1.8 spec URLs (#3238) 2022-01-04 03:57:15 +00:00
attestation_pool.nim limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks (#3293) 2022-01-21 13:33:16 +02:00
block_clearance.nim limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks (#3293) 2022-01-21 13:33:16 +02:00
block_dag.nim complete switch to beacon_chain/specs/datatypes/bellatrix (#3295) 2022-01-18 13:36:52 +00:00
block_pools_types.nim limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks (#3293) 2022-01-21 13:33:16 +02:00
block_quarantine.nim move quarantine outside of chaindag (#3124) 2021-12-06 10:49:01 +01:00
blockchain_dag.nim limit by-root requests to non-finalized blocks (#3293) 2022-01-21 13:33:16 +02:00
exit_pool.nim complete switch to beacon_chain/specs/datatypes/bellatrix (#3295) 2022-01-18 13:36:52 +00:00
spec_cache.nim time: spring cleaning (#3262) 2022-01-11 11:01:54 +01:00
sync_committee_msg_pool.nim Harden CommitteeIndex, SubnetId, SyncSubcommitteeIndex (#3259) 2022-01-09 01:28:49 +02:00

README.md

Consensus object pools

This folder holds the various consensus object pools needed for a blockchain client.

Object in those pools have passed the "gossip validation" filter according to specs:

After "gossip validation" the consensus objects can be rebroadcasted as they are optimistically good, however for internal processing further verification is needed. For blocks, this means verifying state transition and all contained cryptographic signatures (instead of just the proposer signature). For other consensus objects, it is possible that gossip validation is a superset of consensus verification (TODO).

The pools presenet in this folder are:

  • block_pools:
    • block_quarantine: for seemingly valid blocks that are on a fork unknown to us.
    • block_clearance: to verify (state_transition + cryptography) candidate blocks.
    • blockchain_dag: an in-memory direct-acyclic graph of fully validated and verified blockchain candidates with the tail being the last finalized epoch. A block in the DAG MUST be in the fork choice and a block in the fork choice MUST be in the DAG (except for orphans following finalization). On finalization non-empty epoch blocks are stored in the beacon_chain_db.
  • attestation_pool: Handles the attestation received from gossip and collect them for fork choice.
  • exit_pool: Handle voluntary exits and forced exits (attester slashings and proposer slashings)