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Go Consensus

This is a 'simulator', which should be run from within hive.

Cross client testing

Testing implementations of Ethereum clients has been a difficult task. A standard testcase repository has been maintained, but the actual test-execution has been left unspecified.

Each client has had to implement client-specific test-harnesses to perform the tests:

  • The actual execution of the testcase, which includes creating necessary prestate.
  • The verificaton of the testcase, which includes verifying various things, such as:
    • poststate state root
    • lastblock hash
    • Various accounts, and storage.

A generalised test

The Ethereum Standard Testcases testcases have now been transformed so that the bulk of all tests can be expressed as blocktests. The framework consists of the following parts.

  1. The testcase sources. These are basically the current testcases (testfillers). They contain the semantics of each test, and could e.g contain contract source code or individual transactions to be applied to a state. These tests should contain sufficient information for a human to be able to interpret the meaning of the test, and how to go about debugging a failed test.

  2. The testcase artefacts. These are a transformation of the testcases (testfillers), onto the following form:

    prestate + block(s) => postState.

  3. The execution of cross-client testing is then performed using Hive. The hive framework simply performs the following.

  • For each client, for each testcase:
    • Create genesis by combining 'pre' and 'genesisBlockHeader'.
    • Create ruleset, according to testcase (Frontier, Homestead, Tangerine or Spurious), and set Hive ENV variables for the node
    • Instantiate hive-node (client), and write generated files to the node filesystem
    • The node will import blocks upon startup
    • Verify preconditions at block(0), using standard web3 api
    • Verify postconditions at block(n), using standard web3 api
    • Emit testcase subresult to Hive

This repo is responsible for souping up the tests, telling the framework to boot up new clients and then verify the results, and report back to hive,

The Hive framework then outputs the results-report as a json-file, which can be packaged with a HTML viewer and client-logs for analysis of all test failures.

The benefits of this approach is that there is no need for client-implementations to create a bespoke testing framework, as long as they conform to the requirements of being a hive-node. Which are, basically:

  • Ability to import blocks.
  • Ability to configure ruleset via commandline/config.
  • Standard web3 methods (getBlock).

Onboarding a client into Hive is pretty simple:

  1. Create a Docker file (as minimal as possible) which installs the client
  2. Create a shell script which can boot the client according to given ENV variables.
  • The ENV variables contain information about which ruleset to use (Frontier, Homestead, Tangerine etc). The script is also responsible for importing genesis and blocks from the filesystem.

History

This repo is a rewrite of an older version which was implemented in python, and resides within the hive repository.