Forest Roadmap Update (Q2/Q3 2024) 🎉

[ansermino]

Introduction

Forest is a robust full node implementation of the Filecoin protocol, crafted with safety-first in Rust 🦀. At its core, Forest is built on a foundation of key attributes designed to meet the critical needs of node operators and network participants alike. The goals for Forest are:

• Stability: Forest is engineered for dependability. We prioritize stable interfaces, low maintenance, and consistent reliability, ensuring that node operators can trust in Forest's performance day in and day out.
• Performance: Understanding the importance of accessibility in the Filecoin network, we've optimized Forest for efficiency. Our goal is to lower the barriers to entry for network participants, making it more inclusive and expanding the ecosystem.
• Security: As a fundamental component of the network's infrastructure, the security of both the application and its development process cannot be overstated. Forest is developed with the highest security standards in mind, ensuring a secure environment for all users.
• Ease of Use: While managing a node comes with inherent complexities, we strive to make the experience as straightforward as possible. Our aim is for Forest to be approachable for both newcomers and advanced users, minimizing the learning curve and making node operation less cumbersome.

These pillars will continue to shape Forest's development and influence our contributions to the community for the foreseeable future. Through this commitment to stability, performance, security, and ease of use, Forest aims to enhance the Filecoin ecosystem and support the network's growth and accessibility.

Current Status

Forest is currently operating on Mainnet, Calibnet, and Butterflynet. We have successfully participated in the last three mainnet network upgrades without issue, as well as the upcoming NV22 on Calibnet. Performance and stability are good, however we continue to optimize and improve many components.

Snapshot generation and archival data export capabilities are two examples of Forest’s emerging potential. Through various optimizations, primarily on the storage layer (learn more), Forest can generate snapshots on modest hardware and in less than half the time compared to Lotus. Similarly, exports of archival chain data have similar performance advantages and are half the size on disk with a slower growth rate over time.

Forest's snapshot and archival data export capabilities are actively being demonstrated through the Forest Snapshot & Archival Data service. The service leverages Forest's significant performance benefits to generate snapshot and export archival data, which are made available for the community free of charge.

The RPC interface is a work in progress and will be a core focus for the coming months. Presently only a limited set of methods are implemented. The status of the RPC interface can be tracked in this project. (Please reach out if you would like to see certain methods prioritized!)

Overall the performance of Forest is a significant advantage over other implementations, requiring only a 4-core CPU and 16GB of RAM to perform most resource intensive operations. The low resource requirements, and in turn low cost, is a great reason to run Forest. Stay tuned for more metrics and insights in a future post 📈

Upcoming Roadmap

Over the next six months (Q2/Q3 2024) our primary focus will be on increasing the usage of Forest, while also keeping up with network upgrades, and making stability and performance improvements. We will be prioritizing features that enable common use cases (eg. JSONRPC interface) and ensure ease of use as we aim to grow our user base.

Q2 2024

• Expanding the RPC Interface
  • Focus on most used methods
  • Implement Eth methods to support FEVM users
  • Promote a cross-client specification for the JSONRPC interface
• Engage with users to better understand their needs
  • Seek feedback and suggestions from the community
  • Adapt roadmap to address user needs
• Additional performance benchmarking
  • Build cross-client RPC benchmarking tool
  • Capture and analyze resource metrics from long-running instances
• Completion of NV23 upgrade
• Refactor documentation docs.forest.chainsafe.io
  • Focus on common use-cases, ensuring clarity and completeness

Q3 2024

• Continue expanding RPC interface with a focus on performance
  • Target a "complete" interface, while continuing to prioritize the most requested methods
  • Ensure performance is optimized to have the lowest resource footprint
• Initial support for lotus-miner
  • Begin implementation of miner interface
  • Promote a cross-client specification for all miner implementations
• Continue documentation improvements
  • Improve user guides for common use cases
  • Provide tutorials and technical walkthroughs
• Prepare for and conduct a complete audit
• Completion of NV24 upgrade

Conclusion

Forest is gearing up to onboard users. If you are running Filecoin infrastructure consider where Forest might be able to serve your needs, and let us know! Your feedback and suggestions are hugely valuable as we continue exploring how to best serve the needs of the Filecoin community 🙏💙

Get In Touch

We would love to hear from you! 👋

• Bug reports and Feature Requests: Open an issue on Github
• Questions, Comments, Discussions:
  • Filecoin Slack: #fil-forest-help or #fil-forest-dev
  • Forest Github Discussions
• Collaborations or Hand-on Support: forest (at) chainsafe (dot) io
• Documentation: https://docs.forest.chainsafe.io/
• Website https://forest.chainsafe.io/