The total difficulty is the sum of all block difficulties from genesis
to a certain block. This value was used in PoW for deciding which chain
is heavier, and thus which chain to select. Since PoS has a different
fork selection algorithm, all blocks since the merge have a difficulty
of 0, and all total difficulties are the same for the past 2 years.
Whilst the TDs are mostly useless nowadays, there was never really a
reason to mess around removing them since they are so tiny. This
reasoning changes when we go down the path of pruned chain history. In
order to reconstruct any TD, we **must** retrieve all the headers from
chain head to genesis and then iterate all the difficulties to compute
the TD.
In a world where we completely prune past chain segments (bodies,
receipts, headers), it is not possible to reconstruct the TD at all. In
a world where we still keep chain headers and prune only the rest,
reconstructing it possible as long as we process (or download) the chain
forward from genesis, but trying to snap sync the head first and
backfill later hits the same issue, the TD becomes impossible to
calculate until genesis is backfilled.
All in all, the TD is a messy out-of-state, out-of-consensus computed
field that is overall useless nowadays, but code relying on it forces
the client into certain modes of operation and prevents other modes or
other optimizations. This PR completely nukes out the TD from the node.
It doesn't compute it, it doesn't operate on it, it's as if it didn't
even exist.
Caveats:
- Whenever we have APIs that return TD (devp2p handshake, tracer, etc.)
we return a TD of 0.
- For era files, we recompute the TD during export time (fairly quick)
to retain the format content.
- It is not possible to "verify" the merge point (i.e. with TD gone, TTD
is useless). Since we're not verifying PoW any more, just blindly trust
it, not verifying but blindly trusting the many year old merge point
seems just the same trust model.
- Our tests still need to be able to generate pre and post merge blocks,
so they need a new way to split the merge without TTD. The PR introduces
a settable ttdBlock field on the consensus object which is used by tests
as the block where originally the TTD happened. This is not needed for
live nodes, we never want to generate old blocks.
- One merge transition consensus test was disabled. With a
non-operational TD, testing how the client reacts to TTD is useless, it
cannot react.
Questions:
- Should we also drop total terminal difficulty from the genesis json?
It's a number we cannot react on any more, so maybe it would be cleaner
to get rid of even more concepts.
---------
Co-authored-by: Gary Rong <garyrong0905@gmail.com>
This PR fixes an issue with blob transaction propagation due to the blob
transation txpool rejecting transactions with gapped nonces. The
specific changes are:
- fetch transactions from a peer in the order they were announced to
minimize nonce-gaps (which cause blob txs to be rejected
- don't wait on fetching blob transactions after announcement is
received, since they are not broadcast
Testing:
- unit tests updated to reflect that fetch order should always match tx
announcement order
- unit test added to confirm blob transactions are scheduled immediately
for fetching
- running the PR on an eth mainnet full node without incident so far
---------
Signed-off-by: Roberto Bayardo <bayardo@alum.mit.edu>
Co-authored-by: Gary Rong <garyrong0905@gmail.com>
Improving two things here:
On hive, where we look at these tests, the Go code comment above the test
is not visible. When there is a failure, it's not obvious what the test is actually
expecting. I have converted the comments in to printed log messages to
explain the test more.
Second, I noticed that besu is failing some tests because it happens to request
a header when we want it to send transactions. Trying the minimal fix here to
serve the headers.
Co-authored-by: lightclient <14004106+lightclient@users.noreply.github.com>
Here we update the eth and snap protocol test suites with a new test chain,
created by the hivechain tool. The new test chain uses proof-of-stake. As such,
tests using PoW block propagation in the eth protocol are removed. The test suite
now connects to the node under test using the engine API in order to make it
accept transactions.
The snap protocol test suite has been rewritten to output test descriptions and
log requests more verbosely.
---------
Co-authored-by: Felix Lange <fjl@twurst.com>
* eth/fetcher: introduce some lag in tx fetching
* eth/fetcher: change conditions a bit
* eth/fetcher: use per-batch quota check
* eth/fetcher: fix some comments
* eth/fetcher: address review concerns
* eth/fetcher: fix panic + add warn log
* eth/fetcher: fix log
* eth/fetcher: fix log
* cmd/devp2p/internal/ethtest: fix ignorign tx announcements from prev. tests
* cmd/devp2p/internal/ethtest: fix TestLargeTxRequest
This increases the number of tx relay messages the test waits for. Since
go-ethereum now processes incoming txs in smaller batches, the
announcement messages it sends are also smaller.
Co-authored-by: Felix Lange <fjl@twurst.com>
Debugging recent geth failures in hive, it took a while to realize that it's because
geth doesn't support eth/65 any longer. This PR makes such failures a bit more
easy to figure out.
This PR refactors the eth test suite to make it more readable and
easier to use. Some notable differences:
- A new file helpers.go stores all of the methods used between
both eth66 and eth65 and below tests, as well as methods shared
among many test functions.
- suite.go now contains all of the test functions for both eth65
tests and eth66 tests.
- The utesting.T object doesn't get passed through to other helper methods,
but is instead only used within the scope of the test function,
whereas helper methods return errors, so only the test function
itself can fatal out in the case of an error.
- The full test suite now only takes 13.5 seconds to run.
This PR replaces the old test genesis.json and chain.rlp files in the testdata
directory for the eth protocol test suite, and also adds documentation for
running the eth test suite locally.
It also improves the test output text and adds more timeouts.
Co-authored-by: Felix Lange <fjl@twurst.com>
Péter Szilágyi
Roberto Bayardo
Martin HS
Felix Lange
colin
Sina Mahmoodi
vuittont60
lightclient
Marius van der Wijden
rene