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Internals

Background

Go Plugin

geth is written in the Go programming language. Go 1.8 introduced a new plugin architecture which allows for the creation of plugins (via plugin build mode) and to use these plugins at runtime (via plugin package). In order to utilize this architecture, there are strict requirements in developing plugins.

By using the network RPC interface, the plugin is independently built and distributed without having to rebuild geth. Especially with gRPC interfaces, plugins can be written in different languages (see our examples). This makes it easy for you to build a prototype feature or even a proprietary plugin for your organization’s internal use.

We use HashiCorp’s go-plugin library as it fits our asks and it has been proven in many plugin-based production systems.

Why we decided to use plugins

There are number of benefits:

  • Dynamically-linked binaries (which you get when using plugins) are much smaller than statically compiled binaries.
  • We value the ability to isolate failures. E.g.: Quorum client would continue mining/validating even if security plugin has crashed.
  • Easily enables support for open source plugins written in languages other than Go.

Design

uml diagram

Discovery

The Quorum client reads the plugin settings file to determine which plugins are going to be loaded and searches for installed plugins (<name>-<version>.zip files) in the plugin baseDir (defaults to <datadir>/plugins). If the required plugin doesnt exist in the path, Quorum will attempt to use the configured plugin central to download the plugin.

PluginManager

The PluginManager manages the plugins being used inside geth. It reads the configuration and builds a registry of plugins. PluginManager implements the standard Service interface in geth, hence being embedded into the geth service life cycle, i.e.: expose service APIs, start and stop. The PluginManager service is registered as early as possible in the node lifecycle. This is to ensure the node fails fast if an issue is encountered when registering the PluginManager, so as not to impact other services.

Plugin Reloading

The PluginManager exposes an API (admin_reloadPlugin) that allows reloading a plugin. This attempts to restart the current plugin process.

Any changes to the plugin config after initial node start will be applied when reloading the plugin.
This is demonstrated in the HelloWorld plugin example.