Dev Docs: Document Blocks-First IBD & Orphan Blocks #685
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Rebased to fix merge conflicts. |
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| It's important to headers-first nodes that the blocks be requested and | ||
| sent in order because each block header references the header hash of | ||
| the preceeding block. That means the IBD node can't fully validate a |
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@harding s/preceeding/preceding/
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@harding Thanks!! LGTM |
This commit provides a detailed overview of the current block download method, which I've retroactively named blocks-first for parallelism with headers-first. New And Significantly Revised: * New Initial Block Download (IBD) section (h3) with Blocks-First subsection (h4) * New Orphan Block subsection (under Blocks Broadcasting) describing orphan blocks and how they're handled under blocks-first. Also includes a simple illustration of the difference between orphan blocks and stale blocks. Thanks to luke-jr for his s/orphan block/stale block/ commit a couple months ago---that made this commit much easier. Edits: * Cleaned up a couple cases missed by previous s/orphan/stale/ commit because they used past tense (orphaned). * In P2P reference section, mentioned that a `block` message can be sent unsolicited by miners. * Mention that `getheaders` and `headers` were added in protocol version 31800. * Moved a few internal links around and added a few new internal links. Administrivia: * Started adding "TODOv0.10" in HTML comments to places that need to be updated when 0.10 is released so that I can easily git grep for that tag later.
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* 685: Dev Docs: Document Blocks-First IBD & Orphan Blocks * 721: Dev Docs: Mention Upcoming v3 Blocks/BIP66
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Dev Docs: Document Blocks-First IBD & Orphan Blocks
Preview IBD section: http://dg0.dtrt.org/en/developer-guide#initial-block-download
Preview Orphan Blocks section: http://dg0.dtrt.org/en/developer-guide#orphan-blocks
This pull adds a new section about the Initial Block Download (IBD) method used in Bitcoin Core 0.9, which I've retroactively named blocks-first. It also adds a short section explaining the difference between orphan blocks and stale blocks. See the commit message for minor details.
This is a partial resubmission of closed pull #660 focusing only on the current IBD method. This keeps the text shorter and, hopefully, easier to review. I also think this version is much, much better---it includes nearly 100% rewritten text plus five new illustrations that didn't appear in the original pull. After we get this merged, I'll rewrite and resubmit the headers-first part of pull #660.