The op-batcher is responsible for ensuring data availability. See the specs.
The op-batcher works together with the sequencer (which it reads unsafe blocks from), the data availability layer (e.g. Layer 1 or an Alt DA layer, which it posts data to), and the derivation pipeline (which reads the data from the DA layer and progresses the safe chain).
It depends directly on some code shared with the derivation pipeline, namely the ChannelOut implementation(s). It also depends directly on the shared txmgr module.
The batcher has a suite of unit test which can be triggered by running
go test ./...
from this directory. There are also end-to-end tests in op-e2e which integrate the batcher.
The architecture of this batcher implementation is shown on the left side of the following diagram:
Batch submitting (writing to the DA layer, in the middle of the diagram) works together with the derivation pipeline (on the right side of the diagram, reading from the DA layer) to progress the safe chain.
The philosophy behind the current architecture is:
- Blocks, channels and frames are kept around for as long as they might be needed, and discarded as soon as they are not needed. They are not moved from one part of state to another.
- We retain block data in a strict order for as long as necessary. We only garbage collect frames, channels and blocks when the safe head moves sufficiently and those structures have done their job.
- When something goes wrong, we rewind the state cursors by the minimal amount we need to get going again.
In the happy path, the batcher periodically: 0. Queries the sequencer's syncStatus and a. (optionally) waits for it to ingest more L1 data before taking action b. prunes blocks and channels from its internal state which are no longer required
- Enqueues unsafe blocks and dequeues safe blocks from the sequencer to its internal state.
- Enqueues a new channel, if necessary.
- Processes some unprocessed blocks into the current channel, triggers the compression of the block data and the creation of frames.
- Sends frames from the channel queue to the DA layer as (e.g. to Ethereum L1 as calldata or blob transactions).
- If there is more transaction data to send, go to 2. Else wait for a tick and go to 0.
The blockCursor state variable tracks the next unprocessed block.
In each channel, the frameCursor tracks the next unsent frame.
When an L2 unsafe reorg is detected, the batch submitter will reset its state, and wait for any in flight transactions to be ingested by the verifier nodes before starting work again.
When a Tx fails, an asynchronous receipts handler is triggered. The channel from whence the Tx's frames came has its frameCursor rewound, so that all the frames can be resubmitted in order.
When a Tx is confirmed, an asynchronous receipts handler is triggered. We only update the batcher's state if the channel timed out on chain. In that case, the blockCursor is rewound to the first block added to that channel, and the channel queue is cleared out. This allows the batcher to start fresh building a new channel starting from the same block -- it does not need to refetch blocks from the sequencer.
At the current time, the batcher should be optimized for correctness, simplicity and robustness. It is considered preferable to prioritize these properties, even at the expense of other potentially desirable properties such as frugality. For example, it is preferable to have the batcher resubmit some data from time to time ("wasting" money on data availability costs) instead of avoiding that by e.g. adding some persistent state to the batcher.
The batcher can almost always recover from unforeseen situations by being restarted.
Some complexity is permitted, however, for handling data availability switching, so that the batcher is not wasting money for longer periods of time.
A chain can potentially experience an influx of large transactions whose data availability requirements exceed the total throughput of the data availability layer. While this situation might resolve on its own in the long term through the data availability pricing mechanism, in practice this feedback loop is too slow to prevent a very large backlog of data from being produced, even at a relatively low cost to whomever is submitting the large transactions. In such circumstances, the safe head can fall significantly behind the unsafe head, and the time between seeing a transaction (and charging it a given L1 data fee) and actually posting the transaction to the data availability layer grows larger and larger. Because DA costs can rise quickly during such an event, the batcher can end up paying far more to post the transaction to the DA layer than what can be recovered from the transaction's data fee.
To prevent a significant DA backlog, the batcher can instruct the block builder (via op-geth's miner RPC API) to impose thresholds on the total DA requirements of a single block, and/or the maximum DA requirement of any single transaction. In the happy case, the batcher instructs the block builder to impose a block-level DA limit of OP_BATCHER_THROTTLE_ALWAYS_BLOCK_SIZE, and imposes no additional limit on the DA requirements of a single transaction. But in the case of a DA backlog (as defined by OP_BATCHER_THROTTLE_THRESHOLD), the batcher instructs the block builder to instead impose a (tighter) block level limit of OP_BATCHER_THROTTLE_BLOCK_SIZE, and a single transaction limit of OP_BATCHER_THROTTLE_TRANSACTION_SIZE.
The batcher tries to ensure that batches are posted at a minimum frequency specified by MAX_CHANNEL_DURATION. To achieve this, it caches the l1 origin of the last submitted channel, and will force close a channel if the timestamp of the l1 head moves beyond the timestamp of that l1 origin plus MAX_CHANNEL_DURATION. When clearing its state, e.g. following the detection of a reorg, the batcher will not clear the cached l1 origin: this way, the regular posting of batches will not be disturbed by events like reorgs.
Link to open issues with the op-batcher tag.
The batcher launches L1 transactions in parallel so that it can achieve higher throughput, particularly in situations where there is a large backlog of data which needs to be posted. Sometimes, transactions can get stuck in the L1 mempool. The batcher does have functionality to clear these stuck transactions, but it is not completely reliable.
The automatic data availability switching behavior is a somewhat new feature which may still have some bugs in it.