There are 3 pieces of data that are maintained on disk. The actual block
and undo data, the block index (which can refer to positions on disk),
and the chainstate (which refers to the best block hash).
Earlier, there was no guarantee that blocks were written to disk before
block index entries referring to them were written. This commit introduces
dirty flags for block index data, and delays writing entries until the actual
block data is flushed.
With this stricter ordering in writes, it is now safe to not always flush
after every block, so there is no need for the IsInitialBlockDownload()
check there - instead we just write whenever enough time has passed or
the cache size grows too large. Also updating the wallet's best known block
is delayed until this is done, otherwise the wallet may end up referring to an
unknown block.
In addition, only do a write inside the block processing loop if necessary
(because of cache size exceeded). Otherwise, move the writing to a point
after processing is done, after relaying.
Like in a real world situation, a safe mode test should also be visible in the
UI. A test of safe mode is furthermore mostly relevant for developers, so it
should not be overwritten by a warning about a pre-release test build.
Previously, AcceptBlockHeader did not check the header (in particular
PoW). This made the client accept invalid-PoW-headers from peers in
headers-first sync.
This is a simplified re-do of closed pull #3088.
This patch eliminates the privacy and reliability problematic use
of centralized web services for discovering the node's addresses
for advertisement.
The Bitcoin protocol already allows your peers to tell you what
IP they think you have, but this data isn't trustworthy since
they could lie. So the challenge is using it without creating a
DOS vector.
To accomplish this we adopt an approach similar to the one used
by P2Pool: If we're announcing and don't have a better address
discovered (e.g. via UPNP) or configured we just announce to
each peer the address that peer told us. Since peers could
already replace, forge, or drop our address messages this cannot
create a new vulnerability... but if even one of our peers is
giving us a good address we'll eventually make a useful
advertisement.
We also may randomly use the peer-provided address for the
daily rebroadcast even if we otherwise have a seemingly routable
address, just in case we've been misconfigured (e.g. by UPNP).
To avoid privacy problems, we only do these things if discovery
is enabled.
Previous refactorings broke the ability to rebuild the chainstate by deleting the chainstate
directory, resulting in an incorrect "Incorrect or no genesis block found" error message. Fix
that.
Also, improve the performance of ActivateBestBlockStep by using the skiplist to only discover
a few potential blocks to connect at a time, instead of all blocks forever - as we likely bail
out after connecting a single one anyway.
Instead of skipping to the last reindexed block in each file (which could
jump over processed out-of-order blocks), just skip each already processed
block individually.
Remember out-of-order block headers along with disk positions. This is
likely the simplest and least-impact way to make -reindex work with
headers first.
Based on top of #4468.
Many changes:
* Do not use 'getblocks', but 'getheaders', and use it to build a headers tree.
* Blocks are fetched in parallel from all available outbound peers, using a
limited moving window. When one peer stalls the movement of the window, it is
disconnected.
* No more orphan blocks. At all. We only ever request a block for which we have
verified the headers, and store it to disk immediately. This means that a
disk-fill attack would require PoW.
* Require protocol version 31800 for every peer (released in december 2010).
* No more syncnode (we sync from everyone we can, though limited to 1 during
initial *headers* sync).
* Introduce some extra named constants, comments and asserts.
This adds a -regetest-only undocumented (for regression testing only)
command-line option -blockversion=N to set block.nVersion.
Adds to the "has the rest of the network upgraded to a
block.nVersion we don't understand" code so it calls
-alertnotify when 51 of the last 100 blocks are up-version.
But it only alerts once, not with every subsequent new, upversion
block.
And adds a forknotify.py regression test to make sure it works.
Tested using forknotify.py:
Before adding CAlert::Notify, get:
Assertion failed: -alertnotify did not warn of up-version blocks
Before adding code to only alert once:
Assertion failed: -alertnotify excessive warning of up-version blocks
After final code in this pull:
Tests successful
There is only one message passed to AbortNode() that makes sense to
translate to the user specifically: Disk space is low. For the others
show a generic message and refer to debug.log for details.
Reduces the number of confusing jargon translation messages.
Pieter Wuille