This commit is a preparation for the upcoming metropolis hardfork. It
prepares the state, core and vm packages such that integration with
metropolis becomes less of a hassle.
* Difficulty calculation requires header instead of individual
parameters
* statedb.StartRecord renamed to statedb.Prepare and added Finalise
method required by metropolis, which removes unwanted accounts from
the state (i.e. selfdestruct)
* State keeps record of destructed objects (in addition to dirty
objects)
* core/vm pre-compiles may now return errors
* core/vm pre-compiles gas check now take the full byte slice as argument
instead of just the size
* core/vm now keeps several hard-fork instruction tables instead of a
single instruction table and removes the need for hard-fork checks in
the instructions
* core/vm contains a empty restruction function which is added in
preparation of metropolis write-only mode operations
* Adds the bn256 curve
* Adds and sets the metropolis chain config block parameters (2^64-1)
This commit adds pluggable consensus engines to go-ethereum. In short, it
introduces a generic consensus interface, and refactors the entire codebase to
use this interface.
This significantly reduces the dependency closure of ethclient, which no
longer depends on core/vm as of this change.
All uses of vm.Logs are replaced by []*types.Log. NewLog is gone too,
the constructor simply returned a literal.
The run loop, which previously contained custom opcode executes have been
removed and has been simplified to a few checks.
Each operation consists of 4 elements: execution function, gas cost function,
stack validation function and memory size function. The execution function
implements the operation's runtime behaviour, the gas cost function implements
the operation gas costs function and greatly depends on the memory and stack,
the stack validation function validates the stack and makes sure that enough
items can be popped off and pushed on and the memory size function calculates
the memory required for the operation and returns it.
This commit also allows the EVM to go unmetered. This is helpful for offline
operations such as contract calls.
Environment is now a struct (not an interface). This
reduces a lot of tech-debt throughout the codebase where a virtual
machine environment had to be implemented in order to test or run it.
The new environment is suitable to be used en the json tests, core
consensus and light client.
