This Month in Forest - May 2024

[LesnyRumcajs]

This month in Forest 🌲

It was a busy month for the Forest team. Let's see what happened!

Highlights

NV22 Dragon 🐉 update on mainnet

After several postponements, the NV22 Dragon update has finally landed on the mainnet. The state migration was demanding, even for Forest users (64 GiB of memory required!), but we managed to go through without significant issues. Users (also from Lotus/Venus) who got knocked out during the upgrade could quickly get back on track using Forest snapshots, which were publicly available ~30 minutes after the upgrade. 🚀

We are looking forward to the next update! What will be its codename? 🤔

Forest roadmap for Q2/Q3 2024 released 🏞

After numerous internal discussions, the team has released the roadmap for the next two quarters. The main focus will be on expanding the existing Lotus JSON-RPC API for interoperability with Lotus (possibly standardizing it via FIP), supporting the Lotus miner (and Curio! work is in progress), and continuing to improve the performance and documentation.

Read the full announcement here.

RPC method tracking 🔍

For projects that want to integrate with Forest, we have started tracking the status of the RPC methods on this board. If a method is missing or not working as expected, please let us know by creating an issue (or a PR!).

Development

Endpoints

Added

In the past month, we added support for:

• Filecoin.ChainTipSetWeight
• Filecoin.EthGetBlockByNumber
• Filecoin.Filecoin.StateMarketBalance
• Filecoin.Filecoin.StateMinerPartitions
• Filecoin.StateDealProviderCollateralBounds
• Filecoin.StateGetBeaconEntry
• Filecoin.StateMinerInitialPledgeCollateral
• Filecoin.StateMinerPreCommitDepositForPower
• Filecoin.SyncSubmitBlock
• Filecoin.Web3ClientVersion

Fixed

"If builders built houses the way programmers build programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy
civilization." - Gerald Weinberg

Hopefully, it's not as bad! That said, we had to fix a few non-conforming behaviours in the following endpoints:

• Filecoin.ChainNotify
• Filecoin.GasEstimateGasLimit
• Filecoin.StateAccountKey
• Filecoin.StateListMessages
• Filecoin.StateVMCirculatingSupplyInternal

There is also much ongoing work in refactoring the current JSON-RPC framework internals.

Other

Extra few endpoints, though not RPC - health check endpoints 🩺 ! They will help operators in maintaining Forest nodes:

• /healthz
• /readyz
• /livez

See the documentation for details.

Notable additions

• Added forest-tool shed private-key-from-key-pair and forest-tool shed key-pair-from-private-key commands to
  facilitate changing between Forest and Lotus key formats.
• Added forest-cli net reachability command to print information about its reachability from the internet.
• Added support for multiple snapshot files in the forest-tool api serve offline mode.
• Filecoin proof parameters will now be downloaded from our self-hosted Cloudflare R2 bucket by default. This improves the reliability of the download process, which did not meet our standards before. The fallback to the IPFS gateway is still available in case of any issues.

Other

You can find the complete list of changes in the CHANGELOG. Note that this only contains the user-facing modifications; there were also many internal changes and improvements.