## Issue Addressed
Closes#800Closes#1713
## Proposed Changes
Implement the temporary state storage algorithm described in #800. Specifically:
* Add `DBColumn::BeaconStateTemporary`, for storing 0-length temporary marker values.
* Store intermediate states immediately as they are created, marked temporary. Delete the temporary flag if the block is processed successfully.
* Add a garbage collection process to delete leftover temporary states on start-up.
* Bump the database schema version to 2 so that a DB with temporary states can't accidentally be used with older versions of the software. The auto-migration is a no-op, but puts in place some infra that we can use for future migrations (e.g. #1784)
## Additional Info
There are two known race conditions, one potentially causing permanent faults (hopefully rare), and the other insignificant.
### Race 1: Permanent state marked temporary
EDIT: this has been fixed by the addition of a lock around the relevant critical section
There are 2 threads that are trying to store 2 different blocks that share some intermediate states (e.g. they both skip some slots from the current head). Consider this sequence of events:
1. Thread 1 checks if state `s` already exists, and seeing that it doesn't, prepares an atomic commit of `(s, s_temporary_flag)`.
2. Thread 2 does the same, but also gets as far as committing the state txn, finishing the processing of its block, and _deleting_ the temporary flag.
3. Thread 1 is (finally) scheduled again, and marks `s` as temporary with its transaction.
4.
a) The process is killed, or thread 1's block fails verification and the temp flag is not deleted. This is a permanent failure! Any attempt to load state `s` will fail... hope it isn't on the main chain! Alternatively (4b) happens...
b) Thread 1 finishes, and re-deletes the temporary flag. In this case the failure is transient, state `s` will disappear temporarily, but will come back once thread 1 finishes running.
I _hope_ that steps 1-3 only happen very rarely, and 4a even more rarely. It's hard to know
This once again begs the question of why we're using LevelDB (#483), when it clearly doesn't care about atomicity! A ham-fisted fix would be to wrap the hot and cold DBs in locks, which would bring us closer to how other DBs handle read-write transactions. E.g. [LMDB only allows one R/W transaction at a time](https://docs.rs/lmdb/0.8.0/lmdb/struct.Environment.html#method.begin_rw_txn).
### Race 2: Temporary state returned from `get_state`
I don't think this race really matters, but in `load_hot_state`, if another thread stores a state between when we call `load_state_temporary_flag` and when we call `load_hot_state_summary`, then we could end up returning that state even though it's only a temporary state. I can't think of any case where this would be relevant, and I suspect if it did come up, it would be safe/recoverable (having data is safer than _not_ having data).
This could be fixed by using a LevelDB read snapshot, but that would require substantial changes to how we read all our values, so I don't think it's worth it right now.
## Issue Addressed
Solution 2 proposed here: https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/1435#issuecomment-692317639
## Proposed Changes
- Adds an optional `--wss-checkpoint` flag that takes a string `root:epoch`
- Verify that the given checkpoint exists in the chain, or that the the chain syncs through this checkpoint. If not, shutdown and prompt the user to purge state before restarting.
## Additional Info
Co-authored-by: Paul Hauner <paul@paulhauner.com>
## Issue Addressed
NA
## Proposed Changes
Sets the default max skips to 700 so that it can cover the 693 slot skip from `80894 - 80201`.
## Additional Info
NA
## Proposed Changes
To mitigate the impact of minority forks on RAM and disk usage, this change rejects blocks whose parent lies more than 320 slots (10 epochs, ~1 hour) in the past. The behaviour is configurable via `lighthouse bn --max-skip-slots N`, and can be turned off entirely using `--max-skip-slots none`.
Co-authored-by: Paul Hauner <paul@paulhauner.com>
