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.
S. Matthew English
Jeffrey Wilcke
Martin Holst Swende
Felix Lange
Péter Szilágyi