[Meta: "Bitcoin Core" is the newfangled branding of bitcoind / Bitcoin-Qt reference implementation, in case you wondering.]
Several sites, including BitPay, use bitcoind outside the standard role of wallet software. bitcoind can be used purely for payment network access and management. I call this the "border router" role. Upcoming version 0.9 will feature the ability to disable the bitcoind wallet at compile time or runtime. This permits a more optimized border router profile, reducing process size by 40-200MB according to some reports. Recent IRC discussion have floated a rough proposal for a wallet next-step: Running the Bitcoin Core wallet as a separate process, a separate binary, from the blockchain engine. The wallet process would communicate with the blockchain engine using existing RPC and P2P channels, becoming a real SPV client. This accomplishes a longstanding security goal of sandboxing away wallet keys and sensitive data from the network-exposed P2P engine, in a separate process, among other benefits. Simple forking was explored a bit. I did some hacking in that direction, as it seemed potentially lightweight and somewhat easy to me: https://github.com/jgarzik/bitcoin/tree/fork fork+pipe is fine for Linux and OSX/BSD. However, Windows requires an exec-like solution to create a new process. MSDN does give us a Unix-pipe-like solution: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/edze9h7e%28v=vs.80%29.aspx Others pointed to boost interprocess communication APIs, which come with their own set of caveats. Such a solution would involve a brand new IPC protocol, and lots of brand new glue code. Separate programs seems better. Windows forces us to achieve process separation via exec-like method. We already have IPC: RPC + P2P. Modern OS's make localhost sockets just about as fast as other IPCs methods. Linux, at least, employs zero-copy for localhost sockets in many situations, similar to the kernel's pipe tricks. Pieter has been working on headers-first sync: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2964 Moving along this wallet/blockchain engine split requires upping the review&test bandwidth on Pieter's PRs, such as https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3514 Unsure how much of the separate-binary discussion Gavin saw, so cc'd for emphasis. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121054471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
