Make `t9n` and `t8n` tool compatible with fee-currency transactions

[ezdac]

Rationale

There are two geth evm tools that are currently not working with the fee-currency transactions:

• transition tool (t8n) : a stateless state transition utility
• transaction tool (t9n) : a transaction validation utility

The main reason both tools do not work out of the box with fee-currency transactions is the dependency on
on-chain data for both tx validation and state transition, while the tools itself are "stateless":

The t9n tools requires the intrinsic gas cost for the specific fee-currencies:

op-geth/cmd/evm/internal/t8ntool/transaction.go

Lines 136 to 146 in 111be39

	// NOTE: we can't provide specific intrinsic gas costs
	// for fee-currencies here, since those are written to the
	// FeeCurrencyDirectory contract and are chain-specific.
	// When a Celo transaction with specified fee-currency is validated with this tool,
	// this will thus result in a ErrNonWhitelistedFeeCurrency error for now.
	var feeIntrinsic common.IntrinsicGasCosts
	if gas, err := core.IntrinsicGas(tx.Data(), tx.AccessList(), tx.To() == nil,
	chainConfig.IsHomestead(new(big.Int)), chainConfig.IsIstanbul(new(big.Int)), chainConfig.IsShanghai(new(big.Int), 0), tx.FeeCurrency(), feeIntrinsic); err != nil {
	r.Error = err
	results = append(results, r)
	continue

And the t8n tool requires exchange rates as well as intrinsic gas costs for the specific fee-currencies:

op-geth/cmd/evm/internal/t8ntool/execution.go

Lines 209 to 214 in 111be39

	// NOTE: we can't provide exchange rates
	// for fee-currencies here, since those are dynamically changing
	// based on the oracle's exchange rates.
	// When a Celo transaction with specified fee-currency is validated with this tool,
	// this will thus result in a ErrNonWhitelistedFeeCurrency error for now.
	msg, err := core.TransactionToMessage(tx, signer, pre.Env.BaseFee, vmContext.FeeCurrencyContext.ExchangeRates)

Assessment

Before implementing this feature, determine wether this feature is required or wether we don't deem it necessary to use these evm CLI tools with fee-currency transactions.

Implementation

The main question for this issue is how the user can/should provide the required information to the CLI programs.

[palango]

Investigate if this would be useful, especially around the rust implementation and retesteth test suite.

[karlb]

retesteth is replaced by https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests now, but that still uses the t8n tool.

Since the normal test suites don't include any fee currency txs, we should not need to add support for them just to run the existing tests. So the question is "do we want to use this to test our fee currency support or do we prefer other ways to test it". To test support in op-geth, the tracing tests work well (including fee-currency support) and are conceptually similar to using the t8n tool. For kona, we have the kona-executor fill a similar niche.

It would be nice to have a way to run the same test against both op-geth and kona and having a t8n tool for both could be a solution. Any other reasons for making the t8n tool work instead of using what we already have?