Sporks are lost after an in-place upgrade from v23 to v24 and not requested again (non-mainnet networks) #7891

Summary

After an in-place upgrade from 23.1.8 to 24.0.0-rc.3, a node starts with no sporks and does not request them again. On a masternode that means no DKG participation, so it gets PoSe-banned, and it does not accept ChainLocks.

Mainnet is not affected, because its sporks are hardcoded. This affects test networks (devnets, regtest/local networks, possibly testnet).

What we saw

This was on a local regtest network: 7 evonodes plus a seed, created with dashmate, Core upgraded in place one node at a time.

• On the first v24 start the log shows Reading info from sporks.dat..., Loaded info from sporks.dat, Sporks: 0. v24 changed SporkStore::SERIALIZATION_VERSION_STRING from CSporkManager-Version-2 to -Version-3 (src/spork.cpp), so v23's sporks.dat is discarded.
• mnsync then completes MASTERNODE_SYNC_BLOCKCHAIN in 0 s and finishes in the same second.
• No GETSPORKS was ever sent: the per-peer counters show getsporks sent 0 and spork received 0.
  • GETSPORKS only goes out from the sync tick (src/node/sync_manager.cpp), once per peer address via the netfulfilled spork-sync flag, and netfulfilled.dat survives the restart.
  • On an active masternode the tick also skips inbound peers. In a small network most of a masternode's connections are inbound or non-relay masternode connections.
• As a result SPORK_2, SPORK_17 and SPORK_19 were off on each upgraded node. The node sent no qcontrib and was PoSe-banned within 2 DKGs. getbestchainlock returned "Unable to find any ChainLock".

Workaround

After peers reconnect, run dash-cli mnsync reset (sporks arrive within a second), then mnsync next until FINISHED. A reset run before any peer connects does nothing.

Not seen on testnet

Our testnet evonodes on 24.0.0 have all sporks active and are synced. They likely have outbound full-relay peers that answer GETSPORKS. We did not confirm whether those nodes were upgraded in place from v23.

Suggestion

When sporks.dat is discarded for a format mismatch, or simply on startup, request sporks from peers regardless of the persisted spork-sync fulfilled flag. Alternatively, keep loading the previous format.

🤖 Filed with Claude Code on behalf of @shumkov