Skip to content

field-notes.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
104 lines (82 loc) · 4.31 KB

field-notes.md

File metadata and controls

104 lines (82 loc) · 4.31 KB
Raw

Labs and constrained hosts

Signet lab

Default signet catch-up, Electrum-after-tip, and SIGTERM resume: docs/experimental-mainnet.md. Prefer SIGTERM over kill -9 (last uncommitted mempool batch may be lost on hard kill). Same --datadir resumes tip from the relational archive.

Custom Signet

A custom Signet derives its P2P message magic from the challenge. Default Signet seeds are not used, so provide at least one peer with --connect. Use a dedicated datadir for each challenge.

mkdir -p ./datadir-custom-signet
./target/release/rbitcoin-node \
  --datadir ./datadir-custom-signet \
  --network signet \
  --signet-challenge 51 \
  --signet-block-time 60 \
  --connect 192.0.2.1:38333 \
  --listen 0.0.0.0:38333 \
  --milestone 0 \
  --log-level info

The equivalent conf-file keys are signet_challenge and signet_block_time. Replace the illustrative OP_TRUE challenge and documentation-only peer with the parameters supplied by the custom Signet operator.

Mainnet experimental

Catch-up command, milestone table, and Electrum-after-tip: docs/experimental-mainnet.md. 16 GiB / sluggish-disk knobs stay in this file (below).

Before trusting mainnet

  • Signet (or large range) to tip; restart resume
  • Mainnet tip follow without corruption / OOM
  • Post-milestone or --milestone 0 script path exercised
  • Disk headroom for full Class A archive
  • Mempool file growth bounded under load (compaction + eviction)
  • Electrum TCP wallet smoke (subscribe, broadcast, fees; TLS via proxy if needed)
  • Peer diversity and reorg behavior under load

16 GiB RAM / sluggish disk (mainnet)

Full-validation IBD can be disk-bound and make a shared desktop disk sluggish. Prefer a dedicated volume. The example below lowers the mempool weight budget; --mempool-size-mb is not a hard process-RAM limit.

Script validation uses the in-process rbtc-scripts-* worker pool, initialized from std::thread::available_parallelism() (fallback: 4). There is no node worker-count option, and RAYON_NUM_THREADS does not configure this pool.

# The omitted --milestone uses the anchored mainnet checkpoint at 840000.
# Use --milestone 0 for full historical script validation.
nice -n 10 ionice -c 3 ./target/release/rbitcoin-node \
  --datadir /mnt/dedicated/datadir-mainnet \
  --network mainnet \
  --max-outbound 12 \
  --mempool-size-mb 200 \
  --log-level info

Hash-head in-place rehash is gone. An undersized leftover header.head may be rewritten once at open via header.head.grow then rename (store: header.head open-grow). An empty target-sized header.head with a non-empty header.body is refused (wipe those files and reindex).

Slow / constrained uplink (IBD)

--max-outbound / max_outbound is the IBD download peer count (default 16). IBD target_peers is that value clamped to 8..=32, so --max-outbound 4 still dials 8 catch-up peers. Concurrent block getdata is about N × 64 (IbdConfig::per_peer is code-only 64; a 16 MiB payload cap stops one peer holding 64 large bodies; the 1024-hash window still bounds the total; there is no --maxblocksperpeer).

On a typical home uplink use 8. That is also the floor on a tight link: more peers will not raise a saturated wire and can make relative-slow peel a mixed pack. A quiet relative-slow log on a uniformly slow line is intended (cluster gate). --connect a known-fast peer if you have one. While hole= is open, densify issues no new far getdata and tip+1 races the peers that will drain first — that is recovery on a slow line, not a reason to raise outbound.

Consensus notes (historical mainnet)

Full validation has fixed several pre-soft-fork script edges:

Height / class Issue
High-S ECDSA normalize before verify (never consensus-fail)
Hashtype 0 raw byte, not from_consensus → ALL
Lax DER pre-BIP66 always from_der_lax; BIP66 is encoding check
High-bit S, from_der≠lax never prefer strict-first
CODESEPARATOR in scriptSig full EvalScript(scriptSig) for bare
Pre-BIP16 P2SH shape bare HASH160/EQUAL; Core BIP16Exception @ 170060 (testnet3 00000000dd30…b105)

In-memory confirm reject blacklist clears only on process restart after a binary fix.