From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net>
To: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bitcoin Core trial balloon: splitting blockchain engine and wallet
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 06:27:02 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANEZrP2siw9hGPVsPjQ6WyohacOrs8rqs5p9ZsFY5kF0URnPWg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAJHLa0OD7w0Rs5ygAE4C14EWm1=x57YHG2kOee1pzxvj3FQ38g@mail.gmail.com>
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Bear in mind a separate process doesn't buy you anything without a sandbox,
and those are expensive (in terms of complexity).
On 21 Feb 2014 11:40, "Jeff Garzik" <jgarzik@bitpay•com> wrote:
> [Meta: "Bitcoin Core" is the newfangled branding of bitcoind /
> Bitcoin-Qt reference implementation, in case you wondering.]
>
> Several sites, including BitPay, use bitcoind outside the standard
> role of wallet software. bitcoind can be used purely for payment
> network access and management. I call this the "border router" role.
> Upcoming version 0.9 will feature the ability to disable the bitcoind
> wallet at compile time or runtime. This permits a more optimized
> border router profile, reducing process size by 40-200MB according to
> some reports.
>
> Recent IRC discussion have floated a rough proposal for a wallet
> next-step: Running the Bitcoin Core wallet as a separate process, a
> separate binary, from the blockchain engine. The wallet process would
> communicate with the blockchain engine using existing RPC and P2P
> channels, becoming a real SPV client. This accomplishes a
> longstanding security goal of sandboxing away wallet keys and
> sensitive data from the network-exposed P2P engine, in a separate
> process, among other benefits.
>
> Simple forking was explored a bit. I did some hacking in that
> direction, as it seemed potentially lightweight and somewhat easy to
> me: https://github.com/jgarzik/bitcoin/tree/fork fork+pipe is fine
> for Linux and OSX/BSD. However, Windows requires an exec-like
> solution to create a new process. MSDN does give us a Unix-pipe-like
> solution:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/edze9h7e%28v=vs.80%29.aspx
> Others pointed to boost interprocess communication APIs, which come
> with their own set of caveats. Such a solution would involve a brand
> new IPC protocol, and lots of brand new glue code.
>
> Separate programs seems better. Windows forces us to achieve process
> separation via exec-like method. We already have IPC: RPC + P2P.
> Modern OS's make localhost sockets just about as fast as other IPCs
> methods. Linux, at least, employs zero-copy for localhost sockets in
> many situations, similar to the kernel's pipe tricks.
>
> Pieter has been working on headers-first sync:
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2964 Moving along this
> wallet/blockchain engine split requires upping the review&test
> bandwidth on Pieter's PRs, such as
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3514
>
> Unsure how much of the separate-binary discussion Gavin saw, so cc'd
> for emphasis.
>
> --
> Jeff Garzik
> Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
> BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-02-21 6:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-02-21 6:09 Jeff Garzik
2014-02-21 6:27 ` Mike Hearn [this message]
[not found] ` <CA+s+GJCRqqmoHkmsq+6x9Wm6btKzdXoPjw5Af8zRDEkDE+6+zw@mail.gmail.com>
2014-02-21 6:43 ` [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: " Wladimir
2014-02-21 6:50 ` William Yager
2014-02-21 6:54 ` Wladimir
2014-02-22 1:09 ` Dustin D. Trammell
2014-02-22 6:53 ` Wladimir
2014-02-24 22:16 ` James Hartig
2014-02-21 6:50 ` [Bitcoin-development] " Jeff Garzik
2014-02-21 10:41 ` Mike Hearn
2014-02-21 11:06 ` Peter Todd
2014-02-22 1:04 ` Dustin D. Trammell
2014-02-22 2:08 ` Jeff Garzik
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