Appendices

Reference

Running the spec

Introduction

Being written in Python, the spec itself is executable. This is wonderful for generating test cases and there is a whole infrastructure in the specs repo for doing just that.

We can also run the spec ourselves to do interesting things. In this exercise we will calculate the minimum and maximum sizes of the various containers defined by the spec. The following code is from Protolambda, lightly modified to simplify and update it.

from inspect import getmembers, isclass
from eth2spec.utils.ssz.ssz_typing import Container
from eth2spec.altair import mainnet

def get_spec_ssz_types():
    return [
        value for (_, value) in getmembers(mainnet, isclass)
        if issubclass(value, Container) and value != Container  # only the subclasses, not the imported base class
    ]

type_bounds = {
    value.__name__: ({
        'size': value.type_byte_length()
    } if value.is_fixed_byte_length() else {
        'min_size': value.min_byte_length(),
        'max_size': value.max_byte_length(),
    }) for value in get_spec_ssz_types()
}

import json
print(json.dumps(type_bounds))

Set up

We have a bunch of hoops to jump through to get things installed for the first time. The below works well for me on Linux, but I haven't tested extensive variations. Just use the commands prefixed with >, I've included some of the output so you can check whether things are on the right lines.

First, set up a Python virtual environment.

> git clone https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs.git
Cloning into 'consensus-specs'...
...
> cd consensus-specs/
> python3 -m venv .
> source bin/activate
(consensus-specs) > python --version
Python 3.8.10

Now we install and build all the dependencies required for the actual specs.

(consensus-specs) > python setup.py install
... tons of output ...
(consensus-specs) > make install_test
... some initial failures reported but it installs cytoolz and sorts itself out ...
(consensus-specs) > python setup.py pyspecdev
running pyspecdev
running build_py command
running pyspec
...

Run

Finally we can simply run the Python script from above. Copy it into a file called sizes.py and run it as follows.

(consensus-specs) > python sizes.py | jq
{
  "AggregateAndProof": {
    "min_size": 337,
    "max_size": 593
  },
...

The pipe to jq is optional, you will just get less pretty output without it.

Full output

Values are bytes. Don't be too alarmed that the maximum size of BeaconState turns out to be 139TiB!

{
  "AggregateAndProof": {
    "min_size": 337,
    "max_size": 593
  },
  "Attestation": {
    "min_size": 229,
    "max_size": 485
  },
  "AttestationData": {
    "size": 128
  },
  "AttesterSlashing": {
    "min_size": 464,
    "max_size": 33232
  },
  "BeaconBlock": {
    "min_size": 464,
    "max_size": 157816
  },
  "BeaconBlockBody": {
    "min_size": 380,
    "max_size": 157732
  },
  "BeaconBlockHeader": {
    "size": 112
  },
  "BeaconState": {
    "min_size": 2736629,
    "max_size": 152832656015861
  },
  "Checkpoint": {
    "size": 40
  },
  "ContributionAndProof": {
    "size": 264
  },
  "Deposit": {
    "size": 1240
  },
  "DepositData": {
    "size": 184
  },
  "DepositMessage": {
    "size": 88
  },
  "Eth1Block": {
    "size": 48
  },
  "Eth1Data": {
    "size": 72
  },
  "Fork": {
    "size": 16
  },
  "ForkData": {
    "size": 36
  },
  "HistoricalBatch": {
    "size": 524288
  },
  "IndexedAttestation": {
    "min_size": 228,
    "max_size": 16612
  },
  "LightClientUpdate": {
    "size": 25364
  },
  "PendingAttestation": {
    "min_size": 149,
    "max_size": 405
  },
  "ProposerSlashing": {
    "size": 416
  },
  "SignedAggregateAndProof": {
    "min_size": 437,
    "max_size": 693
  },
  "SignedBeaconBlock": {
    "min_size": 564,
    "max_size": 157916
  },
  "SignedBeaconBlockHeader": {
    "size": 208
  },
  "SignedContributionAndProof": {
    "size": 360
  },
  "SignedVoluntaryExit": {
    "size": 112
  },
  "SigningData": {
    "size": 64
  },
  "SyncAggregate": {
    "size": 160
  },
  "SyncAggregatorSelectionData": {
    "size": 16
  },
  "SyncCommittee": {
    "size": 24624
  },
  "SyncCommitteeContribution": {
    "size": 160
  },
  "SyncCommitteeMessage": {
    "size": 144
  },
  "Validator": {
    "size": 121
  },
  "VoluntaryExit": {
    "size": 16
  }
}

Created by Ben Edgington. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Published 2023-07-01 13:17 UTC. Commit 8fa708b.