Commit d16d2a56 authored by Juan Batiz-Benet's avatar Juan Batiz-Benet

fixup the bitswap readme

parent 2b699fbc
#Welcome to Bitswap # Bitswap
###(The data trading engine)
## Protocol
Bitswap is the data trading module for ipfs, it manages requesting and sending
blocks to and from other peers in the network. Bitswap has two main jobs, the
first is to acquire blocks requested by the client from the network. The second
is to judiciously send blocks in its posession to other peers who want them.
Bitswap is a message based protocol, as opposed to response-reply. All messages
contain wantlists, or blocks. Upon receiving a wantlist, a node should consider
sending out wanted blocks if they have them. Upon receiving blocks, the node
should send out a notification called a 'Cancel' signifying that they no longer
want the block. At a protocol level, bitswap is very simple.
## go-ipfs Implementation
Internally, when a message with a wantlist is received, it is sent to the
decision engine to be considered, and blocks that we have that are wanted are
placed into the peer request queue. Any block we possess that is wanted by
another peer has a task in the peer request queue created for it. The peer
request queue is a priority queue that sorts available tasks by some metric,
currently, that metric is very simple and aims to fairly address the tasks
of each other peer. More advanced decision logic will be implemented in the
future. Task workers pull tasks to be done off of the queue, retreive the block
to be sent, and send it off. The number of task workers is limited by a constant
factor.
Client requests for new blocks are handled by the want manager, for every new
block (or set of blocks) wanted, the 'WantBlocks' method is invoked. The want
manager then ensures that connected peers are notified of the new block that we
want by sending the new entries to a message queue for each peer. The message
queue will loop while there is work available and do the following: 1) Ensure it
has a connection to its peer, 2) grab the message to be sent, and 3) send it.
If new messages are added while the loop is in steps 1 or 3, the messages are
combined into one to avoid having to keep an actual queue and send multiple
messages. The same process occurs when the client receives a block and sends a
cancel message for it.
Bitswap is the module that is responsible for requesting and providing data
blocks over the network to and from other ipfs peers. The role of bitswap is
to be a merchant in the large global marketplace of data.
##Main Operations
Bitswap has three high level operations:
- **GetBlocks**
- `GetBlocks` is a bitswap method used to request multiple blocks that are likely
to all be provided by the same set of peers (part of a single file, for example).
- **GetBlock**
- `GetBlock` is a special case of `GetBlocks` that just requests a single block.
- **HasBlock**
- `HasBlock` registers a local block with bitswap. Bitswap will then send that
block to any connected peers who want it (with the strategies approval), record
that transaction in the ledger and announce to the DHT that the block is being
provided.
##Internal Details
All `GetBlock` requests are relayed into a single for-select loop via channels.
Calls to `GetBlocks` will have `FindProviders` called for only the first key in
the set initially, This is an optimization attempting to cut down on the number
of RPCs required. After a timeout (specified by the strategies
`GetRebroadcastDelay`) Bitswap will iterate through all keys still in the local
wantlist, perform a find providers call for each, and sent the wantlist out to
those providers. This is the fallback behaviour for cases where our initial
assumption about one peer potentially having multiple blocks in a set does not
hold true.
When receiving messages, Bitswaps `ReceiveMessage` method is called. A bitswap
message may contain the wantlist of the peer who sent the message, and an array
of blocks that were on our local wantlist. Any blocks we receive in a bitswap
message will be passed to `HasBlock`, and the other peers wantlist gets updated
in the strategy by `bs.strategy.MessageReceived`.
If another peers wantlist is received, Bitswap will call its strategies
`ShouldSendBlockToPeer` method to determine whether or not the other peer will
be sent the block they are requesting (if we even have it).
##Outstanding TODOs:
- [ ] Ensure only one request active per key
- [ ] More involved strategies
- [ ] Ensure only wanted blocks are counted in ledgers
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