Fixes #21379.
The blocks/blk?????.dat files are mutated and become increasingly malformed, or corrupt, as a result of running the re-indexing process.
The mutations occur after the re-indexing process has finished, as new blocks are appended, but are a result of a re-indexing process miscalculation that lingers in the block manager’s m_blockfile_info nSize data until node restart.
These additions to the blk files are non-fatal, but also not desirable.
That is, this is a form of data corruption that the reading code is lenient enough to process (it skips the extra bytes), but it adds some scary looking log messages as it encounters them.
The summary of the problem is that the re-index process double counts the size of the serialization header (magic message start bytes [4 bytes] + length [4 bytes] = 8 bytes) while calculating the blk data file size (both values already account for the serialization header’s size, hence why it is over accounted).
This bug manifests itself in a few different ways, after re-indexing, when a new block from a peer is processed:
- If the new block will not fit into the last blk file processed while re-indexing, while remaining under the 128MiB limit, then the blk file is flushed to disk and truncated to a size that is 8 greater than it should be. The truncation adds zero bytes (see
FlatFileSeq::FlushandTruncateFile). - If the last blk file processed while re-indexing has logical space for the new block under the 128 MiB limit:
- If the blk file was not already large enough to hold the new block, then the zeros are, in effect, added by
fseekwhen the file is opened for writing. Eight zero bytes are added to the end of the last blk file just before the new block is written. This happens because the write offset is 8 too great due to the miscalculation. The result is 8 zero bytes between the end of the last block and the beginning of the next block’s magic + length + block. - If the blk file was already large enough to hold the new block, then the current existing file contents remain in the 8 byte gap between the end of the last block and the beginning of the next block’s magic + length + block. Commonly, when this occcurs, it is due to the blk file containing blocks that are not connected to the block tree during reindex and are thus left behind by the reindex process and later overwritten when new blocks are added. The orphaned blocks can be valid blocks, but due to the nature of concurrent block download, the parent may not have been retrieved and written by the time the node was previously shutdown.
- If the blk file was not already large enough to hold the new block, then the zeros are, in effect, added by
