ECIP 1065: Kunming EVM and Protocol Upgrades
| Author | Wei Tang |
|---|---|
| Status | Draft |
| Type | Meta |
| Created | 2019-10-05 |
Simple Summary
This protocol upgrade provides a backward compatibility foundation to enable future protocol upgrades to be applied with significantly lower chance of breaking existing contracts.
Abstract
This document proposes the following blocks at which to implement the changes specified in “Specification” section.
- Undecided on Ethereum Classic PoW-mainnet.
Specification
At hard fork block, enable EIP-1702:
- Define the previous EVM version as version
0. - Define a new version
1, with the following EVM modifications applied on it.
Discussion
Feature Upgrades
Once the hard fork is enabled, future feature upgrades can be applied
directly on version 1, without the need to define additional new
versions. This simplifies client maintainence, which was one of the
main resistence to apply EIP-1702 in Istanbul.
Any gas cost changes can be applied without worry about backward compatibility issues, because gas cost is now an unobservable behavior in EVM. Any addition of opcodes can be applied without worry about backward compatibility issues, because deployment of unused opcode is disabled. This nearly covers all EVM upgrade paths we need to care about.
Ecosystem
It is possible to deploy a helper contract to allow version 0
contracts continue to be created. This allows unmodified Solidity code
to be deployed, just like what we have now.
However, for version 1, because we made several changes related to
gas cost, which impacts the semantics of certain opcodes such as
CALL* and CREATE*, Solidity compiler must be modified to support
version 1.
Existing common practices might need to change as well. Some practices relies on the observable behavior of gas cost. Relying on gas cost is usually considered to be a bad practice because gas cost can and will change.
On the other hand, version 1 enables some new practices that wasn’t
possible before. For example, a contract can now refuse to be invoked
by any other contracts.
Emergency Hard Fork
Our current gas cost scheme might contain DoS attack vectors. If those
attack vectors must be fixed by changing existing gas cost schemes,
then it must change gas costs specified in version 0. In those
emergency hard fork scenarios, we will inevitably break backward
compatibility.
License
This work is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.