Miner can continue mining after an empty tenure followed by empty sortition

[hstove]

• Closes https://github.com/stacks-network/stacks-core/issues/5400

(hopefully eventually)

This PR currently just contains an integration test to try and reproduce the scenario described in #5400.

The basic flow of the test is:

• boot to nakamoto
• mine a regular block (A) (burn block with TenureChange)
• Have signers reject all new block proposals
• Mine a new BTC block (B) with a sortition
• Wait for the signers to reject it
• Mine a new BTC block (C) without a sortition
• Turn off the block rejection flag

I thought this would reproduce the issue, but things seem fine - the miner creates a TenureExtend off of block A and signers approve it.

JACINTA EDIT:

So I modified the logic to check during continue_tenure to see if we failed to produce any blocks in our tenure which means we really never issued a tenure extend. Now we issue one. I verified this works with multiple empty sortitions, and that we can build off this tenure change payload that shows up late essentially. I also ensured that we do issue a traditional tenure extend in the case where we successfully issued the tenure extend payload. This did require me to chagne the vrf proof generation to use the block election snapshot and not the current burn block to verify. I also found a bug in the way we were passing the election snapshot along (caused miners to never issue a block proposal at all because it would attempt to write to the wrong slot).

Now I know @kantai you wanted the miner to issue a continue tenure after the successful tenure change but I think this is a lot more complicated and has more edge cases that I don't like...Now I can continue to try this though if you think this fix is insufficient / or if there are edge cases that already exist that I am just not seeing.

Will see what CI does...hopefully haven't broken anything

[jferrant]

I think you might need to have 2 sep miners to get this to work. We need to

• boot to nakamoto
• Miner A mines a regular block A (burn block with TenureChange)
• Mine some stacks blocks ontop of Tenure A
• Turn on all block rejections
• Pause commits from Miner A
• Make Miner B win Tenure B
• Miner B should fail to mine anything
• Pause commits from Miner B
• Mine an EMPTY burn block (NO COMMITS)
• Turn off the block rejections
• MINER B SHOULD ATTEMPT TO TENURE EXTEND AND SOMEHOW SUCCEED (this is where we might need to make changes to the code to ensure it does do that.)

[hstove]

Yeah you may be right about needing 2 miners, but I swear this situation involved the same miner winning the first two blocks (though I should double check). I think it's also very possible that there was a different "root cause" in that case.

[jferrant]

Yeah you may be right about needing 2 miners, but I swear this situation involved the same miner winning the first two blocks (though I should double check). I think it's also very possible that there was a different "root cause" in that case.

It could have been done with one miner . It just was not happening because we were failing to produce an empty tenure as easily in the one miner case because of the boot to nakamoto logic. it def can be done. Having two miners makes it just a bit easier and allows a more expansive test as well :)

[hstove]

Nice, this is looking pretty good!

[blockstack-devops]

This pull request has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.