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 pull request refactors the EVM constructor by removing the
TxContext parameter.
The EVM object is frequently overused. Ideally, only a single EVM
instance should be created and reused throughout the entire state
transition of a block, with the transaction context switched as needed
by calling evm.SetTxContext.
Unfortunately, in some parts of the code, the EVM object is repeatedly
created, resulting in unnecessary complexity. This pull request is the
first step towards gradually improving and simplifying this setup.
---------
Co-authored-by: Martin Holst Swende <martin@swende.se>
* miner: untangle miner
* miner: use common.hash instead of *types.header
* cmd/geth: deprecate --mine
* eth: get rid of most miner api
* console: get rid of coinbase in welcome message
* miner/stress: get rid of the miner stress test
* eth: get rid of miner.setEtherbase
* ethstats: remove miner and hashrate flags
* ethstats: remove miner and hashrate flags
* cmd: rename pendingBlockProducer to miner.pending.feeRecipient flag
* miner: use pendingFeeRecipient instead of etherbase
* miner: add mutex to protect the pending block
* miner: add mutex to protect the pending block
* eth: get rid of etherbase mentions
* miner: no need to lock the coinbase
* eth, miner: fix linter
---------
Co-authored-by: Martin Holst Swende <martin@swende.se>
Co-authored-by: Péter Szilágyi <peterke@gmail.com>
This change simplifies the logic for indexing transactions and enhances the UX when transaction is not found by returning more information to users.
Transaction indexing is now considered as a part of the initial sync, and `eth.syncing` will thus be `true` if transaction indexing is not yet finished. API consumers can use the syncing status to determine if the node is ready to serve users.
EIP-4844 adds a new transaction type for blobs. Users can submit such transactions via `eth_sendRawTransaction`. In this PR we refrain from adding support to `eth_sendTransaction` and in fact it will fail if the user passes in a blob hash.
However since the chain can handle such transactions it makes sense to allow simulating them. E.g. an L2 operator should be able to simulate submitting a rollup blob and updating the L2 state. Most methods that take in a transaction object should recognize blobs. The change boils down to adding `blobVersionedHashes` and `maxFeePerBlobGas` to `TransactionArgs`. In summary:
- `eth_sendTransaction`: will fail for blob txes
- `eth_signTransaction`: will fail for blob txes
The methods that sign txes does not, as of this PR, add support the for new EIP-4844 transaction types. Resuming the summary:
- `eth_sendRawTransaction`: can send blob txes
- `eth_fillTransaction`: will fill in a blob tx. Note: here we simply fill in normal transaction fields + possibly `maxFeePerBlobGas` when blobs are present. One can imagine a more elaborate set-up where users can submit blobs themselves and we fill in proofs and commitments and such. Left for future PRs if desired.
- `eth_call`: can simulate blob messages
- `eth_estimateGas`: blobs have no effect here. They have a separate unit of gas which is not tunable in the transaction.
* all: move main transaction pool into a subpool
* go.mod: remove superfluous updates
* core/txpool: review fixes, handle txs rejected by all subpools
* core/txpool: typos
Adds an optional config parameter to eth_call which allows users to override block context fields (same functionality that was added to traceCall in #24871)
---------
Co-authored-by: Martin Holst Swende <martin@swende.se>
Here, the core.Message interface turns into a plain struct and
types.Message gets removed.
This is a breaking change to packages core and core/types. While we do
not promise API stability for package core, we do for core/types. An
exception can be made for types.Message, since it doesn't have any
purpose apart from invoking the state transition in package core.
types.Message was also marked deprecated by the same commit it
got added in, 4dca5d4db7 (November 2016).
The core.Message interface was added in December 2014, in commit
db494170dc, for the purpose of 'testing' state transitions. It's the
same change that made transaction struct fields private. Before that,
the state transition used *types.Transaction directly.
Over time, multiple implementations of the interface accrued across
different packages, since constructing a Message is required whenever
one wants to invoke the state transition. These implementations all
looked very similar, a struct with private fields exposing the fields
as accessor methods.
By changing Message into a struct with public fields we can remove all
these useless interface implementations. It will also hopefully
simplify future changes to the type with less updates to apply across
all of go-ethereum when a field is added to Message.
---------
Co-authored-by: Felix Lange <fjl@twurst.com>
Logs stored on disk have minimal information. Contextual information such as block
number, index of log in block, index of transaction in block are filled in upon request.
We can fill in all these fields only having the block header and list of receipts.
But determining the transaction hash of a log requires the block body.
The goal of this PR is postponing this retrieval until we are sure we the transaction hash.
It happens often that the header bloom filter signals there might be matches in a block,
but after actually checking them reveals the logs do not match. We want to avoid fetching
the body in this case.
Note that this changes the semantics of Backend.GetLogs. Downstream callers of
GetLogs now assume log context fields have not been derived, and need to call
DeriveFields on the logs if necessary.