This Month in Forest - July 2024

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the July edition of This Month in Forest! While some of us are enjoying the summer, the Forest team is working hard to make Forest great (again).

Highlights

Common Node API 🫂

Forest strives to match Lotus's JSON-RPC endpoints. We check ourselves using a detailed test suite, which ensures that our JSON representations match Lotus.

Because of the maturity of Rust's type system and excellent tooling around JSON Schemas, we have been able to design RPC method handlers that correctly emit OpenRPC definitions¹, leapfrogging Lotus in the process.

This work has been the basis for a Filecoin Improvement Proposal for a Common Node API to facilitate client interoperability. You can see the repo for the spec here or browse it on the Open RPC Playground.

Next in this workstream is sharing Forest's test suite with Lotus so that they can start adding integration tests for their API and begin validating themselves against the OpenRPC specification.

Filecoin Dev Summit in Brussels 🇧🇪

Some of the Forest team members attended the Filecoin Dev Summit in Brussels, where we met fellow Filecoin engineers and discussed future plans. We also presented our work on the Common Node API and Forest itself.

NV23 upgrade 🧇

Also, in Brussels, we had a chance to hold an NV23 (calibnet) upgrade party! 🧇 Well, not exactly a party, but we sat with the FilOz team and watched/monitored the upgrade process. The upgrade went smoothly. 🚀 A notable outcome of this was a standardization of the related ASCII art.

Next stop: mainnet in August! See the NV23 thread for more details.

Curio Storage 🔍

We're working closely with the Curio team to integrate their miner with Forest. There are still some rough edges, but we're getting there!

Development

Added 🏗️

In the past month, we added support for the following Filecoin RPC methods:

• Filecoin.EthEstimateGas
• Filecoin.EthFeeHistory
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockByHash
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockTransactionCountByHash
• Filecoin.EthGetMessageCidByTransactionHash
• Filecoin.EthMaxPriorityFeePerGas
• Filecoin.MpoolPushUntrusted
• Filecoin.NetFindPeer
• Filecoin.NetProtectAdd
• Filecoin.StateGetAllAllocations
• Filecoin.StateGetAllClaims
• Filecoin.StateGetAllocationForPendingDeal
• Filecoin.StateGetAllocationIdForPendingDeal
• Filecoin.StateGetAllocation
• Filecoin.StateGetClaim
• Filecoin.StateGetRandomnessDigestFromBeacon
• Filecoin.StateGetRandomnessDigestFromTickets
• Filecoin.StateLookupRobustAddress
• Filecoin.StateMinerAllocated
• Filecoin.StateSectorPartition
• Filecoin.StateVerifiedRegistryRootKey
• Filecoin.WalletSignMessage

And a Foresst-specific one:

• Forest.StateCompute

Fixed 🩹

• We fixed a bug in the Garbage Collection process that prevented it from working correctly. Collisions caused the issue. Well, early optimization is the root of all evil, right?
• Various fixes in the RPC methods, most notably in the Filecoin.ChainNotify method.

Other

• Forest v0.19.0 "Pastel de nata" 💥 released! See the CHANGELOG for more details.

Footnotes

1. OpenRPC is an IDL, similar to OpenAPI or gRPC/Protobufs. ↩