Usage
Before you can use Miden VM, you'll need to make sure you have Rust installed. Miden VM v0.9 requires Rust version 1.75 or later.
Miden VM consists of several crates, each of which exposes a small set of functionality. The most notable of these crates are:
- miden-processor, which can be used to execute Miden VM programs.
- miden-prover, which can be used to execute Miden VM programs and generate proofs of their execution.
- miden-verifier, which can be used to verify proofs of program execution generated by Miden VM prover.
The above functionality is also exposed via the single miden-vm crate, which also provides a CLI interface for interacting with Miden VM.
CLI interface
Compiling Miden VM
To compile Miden VM into a binary, we have a Makefile with the following tasks:
make exec
This will place an optimized, multi-threaded miden
executable into the ./target/optimized
directory. It is equivalent to executing:
cargo build --profile optimized --features concurrent,executable
If you would like to enable single-threaded mode, you can compile Miden VM using the following command:
make exec-single
Controlling parallelism
Internally, Miden VM uses rayon for parallel computations. To control the number of threads used to generate a STARK proof, you can use RAYON_NUM_THREADS
environment variable.
GPU acceleration
Miden VM proof generation can be accelerated via GPUs. Currently, GPU acceleration is enabled only on Apple silicon hardware (via Metal). To compile Miden VM with Metal acceleration enabled, you can run the following command:
make exec-metal
Similar to make exec
command, this will place the resulting miden
executable into the ./target/optimized
directory.
Currently, GPU acceleration is applicable only to recursive proofs which can be generated using the -r
flag.
SIMD acceleration
Miden VM execution and proof generation can be accelerated via vectorized instructions. Currently, SIMD acceleration can be enabled on platforms supporting SVE and AVX2 instructions.
To compile Miden VM with AVX2 acceleration enabled, you can run the following command:
make exec-avx2
To compile Miden VM with SVE acceleration enabled, you can run the following command:
make exec-sve
This will place the resulting miden
executable into the ./target/optimized
directory.
Similar to Metal acceleration, SVE/AVX2 acceleration is currently applicable only to recursive proofs which can be generated using the -r
flag.
Running Miden VM
Once the executable has been compiled, you can run Miden VM like so:
./target/optimized/miden [subcommand] [parameters]
Currently, Miden VM can be executed with the following subcommands:
run
- this will execute a Miden assembly program and output the result, but will not generate a proof of execution.prove
- this will execute a Miden assembly program, and will also generate a STARK proof of execution.verify
- this will verify a previously generated proof of execution for a given program.compile
- this will compile a Miden assembly program (i.e., build a program MAST) and outputs stats about the compilation process.debug
- this will instantiate a Miden debugger against the specified Miden assembly program and inputs.analyze
- this will run a Miden assembly program against specific inputs and will output stats about its execution.repl
- this will initiate the Miden REPL tool.example
- this will execute a Miden assembly example program, generate a STARK proof of execution and verify it. Currently it is possible to runblake3
andfibonacci
examples.
All of the above subcommands require various parameters to be provided. To get more detailed help on what is needed for a given subcommand, you can run the following:
./target/optimized/miden [subcommand] --help
For example:
./target/optimized/miden prove --help
To execute a program using the Miden VM there needs to be a .masm
file containing the Miden Assembly code and a .inputs
file containing the inputs.
Enabling logging
You can use MIDEN_LOG
environment variable to control how much logging output the VM produces. For example:
MIDEN_LOG=trace ./target/optimized/miden [subcommand] [parameters]
If the level is not specified, warn
level is set as default.
Inputs
As described here the Miden VM can consume public and secret inputs.
- Public inputs:
operand_stack
- can be supplied to the VM to initialize the stack with the desired values before a program starts executing. There is no limit on the number of stack inputs that can be initialized in this way, although increasing the number of public inputs increases the cost to the verifier.
- Secret (or nondeterministic) inputs:
advice_stack
- can be supplied to the VM. There is no limit on how much data the advice provider can hold. This is provided as a string array where each string entry represents a field element.advice_map
- is supplied as a map of 64-character hex keys, each mapped to an array of numbers. The hex keys are interpreted as 4 field elements and the arrays of numbers are interpreted as arrays of field elements.merkle_store
- the Merkle store is container that allows the user to definemerkle_tree
,sparse_merkle_tree
andpartial_merkle_tree
data structures.merkle_tree
- is supplied as an array of 64-character hex values where each value represents a leaf (4 elements) in the tree.sparse_merkle_tree
- is supplied as an array of tuples of the form (number, 64-character hex string). The number represents the leaf index and the hex string represents the leaf value (4 elements).partial_merkle_tree
- is supplied as an array of tuples of the form ((number, number), 64-character hex string). The internal tuple represents the leaf depth and index at this depth, and the hex string represents the leaf value (4 elements).
Check out the comparison example to see how secret inputs work.
After a program finishes executing, the elements that remain on the stack become the outputs of the program, along with the overflow addresses (overflow_addrs
) that are required to reconstruct the stack overflow table.
Fibonacci example
In the miden/examples/fib
directory, we provide a very simple Fibonacci calculator example. This example computes the 1001st term of the Fibonacci sequence. You can execute this example on Miden VM like so:
./target/optimized/miden run -a miden/examples/fib/fib.masm -n 1
This will run the example code to completion and will output the top element remaining on the stack.
If you want the output of the program in a file, you can use the --output
or -o
flag and specify the path to the output file. For example:
./target/optimized/miden run -a miden/examples/fib/fib.masm -o fib.out
This will dump the output of the program into the fib.out
file. The output file will contain the state of the stack at the end of the program execution.