How to update consensus mechanisms to use RAFT or ISTANBUL

[nandakishorebhandari]

What is default consensus mechanisms?
How to update consensus to use RAFT or ISTANBUL?

[Lsquared13]

Hi @nandakishorebhandari and thanks for your interest in our tool!

We use QuorumChain consensus in this tool, as it is most relevant for our purposes. We don't currently have the resources to dedicate to making this tool compatible with RAFT or ISTANBUL, but I can point you at the changes I expect would be needed and would gratefully accept a RAFT / ISTANBUL pull request if you or another contributer wanted to make the necessary changes.

Expected Changes

• The Quorum Build needs to be pointed to a branch with RAFT and ISTANBUL available
• Apply the following two small commits: (1 & 2) on top of the version of quorum being used
• The quorum-genesis tool may or may not need to be updated to produce an appropriate genesis block (e.g. remove the voting contract)
• The quorum-genesis install script needs to be pointed to the correct version (e.g. whatever was produced in the above step)
• The part of the init-quorum script that writes the geth command needs to be modified to use the right flags for geth related to RAFT or ISTANBUL
• Probably Optional: I suspect the network will work without this but we should collapse makers, validators, and observers into one group since they will have no distinction anymore. This is probably harder than the rest of these tasks put together since references are everywhere so punting this into another issue is totally reasonable.

Acceptance Criteria

• Networks spun up with RAFT or ISTANBUL successfully create blocks and can complete the private transaction test
• Any PR related to this is made on a new branch, unless changes are backwards compatible
• If the optional cleanup is not complete, another issue is filed regarding it