This Month in Forest - August 2024

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the August 🌞 edition of This Month in Forest! No new RPC methods were added this month, but much work was done around the existing ones, including fixes, improvements, and new features. The Forest team is also working on integrating the F3 and Curio Storage with Forest. Read on to learn more about the latest developments in Forest! 🌲

Highlights

NV23 upgrade 🧇

The NV23 upgrade on the mainnet was a success! The upgrade was performed at epoch 4154640, which was on August 6th. The network is now running smoothly with the new features and improvements. See NV23 post for more details.

Snapshot migration 📸

After some bumps on the road, all the snapshots are now available here. This includes both the latest and archival snapshots.

F3 🚀

We're working on integrating the F3 into Forest. The current plan is to use the go-f3 sidecar approach (once it's ready) and move it to Forest via FFI (using rust2go). This should give the Forest team more flexibility and time for writing rust-f3. 🦀

Curio Storage 🔍

We're working closely with the Curio team to integrate their miner with Forest. Just a few endpoints are required to make it work (theoretically!). We're excited to see the integration in action. The collaboration would allow both Curio and Forest to benefit from each other's features and capabilities; Forest will be able to interact with Curio's storage miner, and Curio will increase its test coverage by using Forest's unique features. That said, it's still a work in progress, and we're implementing the required functionality step by step.

Development

Added 🏗️

• Support for Ethereum aliases; users can now call, e.g., eth_getBlockByNumber and not only Filecoin.EthGetBlockByNumber. This will help with Forest/Lotus interoperability, and possible integration with the existing Ethereum tooling.
• Support for symlinking snapshots when bootstrapping Forest. This allows users to symlink the snapshot from a different location, thus avoiding unnecessary copies, especially if the snapshot is reused across multiple Forest instances.
• Additional metrics for RPC methods, including the number of calls and the time to process them. This will help us to identify bottlenecks and optimize the performance of the RPC methods.

Fixed 🩹

• RPC methods Filecoin.EthGetBlockByNumber, Filecoin.EthGetBlockByHash, Filecoin.GetMinerBaseInfo and Filecoin.StateMinerProvingDeadline. These methods were not working as expected; their behaviour should be consistent with the Lotus implementation.

Improved 🛠️

• Removed the expiration date for the master JWT tokens. This behaviour aligns with the Lotus implementation and simplifies the token management. The Forest team is considering delegating the security layer to another service, which would handle the token validation and RPC method access control. See this issue for details.

Other

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack. - Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings 📖

• We had two releases, v0.19.1 "Pathfinder" and v0.19.2 "Eagle". The latter was a hotfix release to address a bug in the Prometheus metrics. Forest engineers thought the prometheus/rust_client library would expose only the Prometheus-compatible metrics. How silly!

As always, see the CHANGELOG for details. Note that it contains primarily client-facing changes, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, you'll need to go through the commit history. 🤓