What are the differences between these polkadot binaries: polkadot, polkadot-parachain, polkadot-prepare-worker, polkadot-execute-worker?

Question

In the old polkadot repo release page prior to the polkadot-sdk repository merge, polkadot had only one binary called polkadot (there is also staking-miner but it has been moved to its own repo: paritytech/staking-miner-v2).

In recent releases of paritytech/polkadot-sdk v1.1.0 and v1.2.0, we have four of them:

• polkadot
• polkadot-parachain
• polkadot-execute-worker
• polkadot-prepare-worker

What are the respective usages of all these binaries? If I want to launch a polkadot validator, which binary should I use?

Answer 1

All three binaries are needed to properly run a validator node.

The main polkadot binary is started by a user to run the node, as it always has been. After this PR (98.6% OF DEVELOPERS CANNOT REVIEW THIS PR! [read more...]) you need two auxiliary binaries, polkadot-prepare-worker and polkadot-execute-worker which are not intended for any user interaction and are only run by the node software itself. The auxiliary binaries are actually only required if the node runs as a validator, but in the current design, the node will fail to run without them even if it's not a validator.

See also the wiki on how to Installing the Polkadot binaries