## Proposed Changes
This PR has two aims: to speed up attestation packing in the op pool, and to fix bugs in the verification of attester slashings, proposer slashings and voluntary exits. The changes are bundled into a single database schema upgrade (v12).
Attestation packing is sped up by removing several inefficiencies:
- No more recalculation of `attesting_indices` during packing.
- No (unnecessary) examination of the `ParticipationFlags`: a bitfield suffices. See `RewardCache`.
- No re-checking of attestation validity during packing: the `AttestationMap` provides attestations which are "correct by construction" (I have checked this using Hydra).
- No SSZ re-serialization for the clunky `AttestationId` type (it can be removed in a future release).
So far the speed-up seems to be roughly 2-10x, from 500ms down to 50-100ms.
Verification of attester slashings, proposer slashings and voluntary exits is fixed by:
- Tracking the `ForkVersion`s that were used to verify each message inside the `SigVerifiedOp`. This allows us to quickly re-verify that they match the head state's opinion of what the `ForkVersion` should be at the epoch(s) relevant to the message.
- Storing the `SigVerifiedOp` on disk rather than the raw operation. This allows us to continue track the fork versions after a reboot.
This is mostly contained in this commit 52bb1840ae5c4356a8fc3a51e5df23ed65ed2c7f.
## Additional Info
The schema upgrade uses the justified state to re-verify attestations and compute `attesting_indices` for them. It will drop any attestations that fail to verify, by the logic that attestations are most valuable in the few slots after they're observed, and are probably stale and useless by the time a node restarts. Exits and proposer slashings and similarly re-verified to obtain `SigVerifiedOp`s.
This PR contains a runtime killswitch `--paranoid-block-proposal` which opts out of all the optimisations in favour of closely verifying every included message. Although I'm quite sure that the optimisations are correct this flag could be useful in the event of an unforeseen emergency.
Finally, you might notice that the `RewardCache` appears quite useless in its current form because it is only updated on the hot-path immediately before proposal. My hope is that in future we can shift calls to `RewardCache::update` into the background, e.g. while performing the state advance. It is also forward-looking to `tree-states` compatibility, where iterating and indexing `state.{previous,current}_epoch_participation` is expensive and needs to be minimised.
## Proposed Changes
Update the merge migration docs to encourage updating mainnet configs _now_!
The docs are also updated to recommend _against_ `--suggested-fee-recipient` on the beacon node (https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/3432).
Additionally the `--help` for the CLI is updated to match with a few small semantic changes:
- `--execution-jwt` is no longer allowed without `--execution-endpoint`. We've ended up without a default for `--execution-endpoint`, so I think that's fine.
- The flags related to the JWT are only allowed if `--execution-jwt` is provided.
## Proposed Changes
Add a list of schema version changes to the book.
I hope this will be helpful for users upgrading to v2.5.0, to know that they can downgrade to schema v9 to run v2.3.0/v2.4.0 or to schema v8 to run v2.2.0/v2.1.0.
## Proposed Changes
Add documentation for the `lighthouse db migate` command, which users will be able to use to downgrade from Lighthouse v2.3.0 on non-merge networks (mainnet & Prater).
I think it's important to get this into the live instance of the book so we can link to it from the v2.3.0 release notes.
