One of Filecoin's startup goals has always been to have the implementation of multiple read protocols to help the network at startup. This article will detail the latest developments and implement the next steps for each of the four major implementations: Forest, built by Chainsafe; Fuhon developed by Soramitsu; Venus managed by IPFSForce (previously called go-filecoin); and Lotus, by Protocol Labs create. V| jasonbody
forest:
Forest is implemented by Rust Filecoin developed by ChainSafe. The project currently focuses on two main goals, the main goal being synchronization and interoperability with the main network. The team aims to achieve this goal in stages, first realizing the direct introduction of the chain, and then gradually synchronizing the chain through the network. As a secondary goal, the team is working hard to achieve full node functionality.
The latest developments in these goals include:
Integrating changes of miner participants since version 0.9.3
- Release a complete implementation of storage miners
- Consolidate changes to the message pool, including message reposting, restoration and selection logic
- Update conformance tests to find and resolve incompatibility issues
- Complete the transfer of state manager and chain storage to identify changes that have occurred since implementation
- Create a local devnet
- Test and refactor AMT implementation
Forest is one of the first users of the recently created test vector conformance test to ensure compatibility and correctness between different Filecoin implementations and Filecoin specifications. With the help of a diverse corpus of messages, hint sets and chain-level vectors, this helped the team move very quickly towards full interoperability, and they also helped in revision and improvement.
The Forest team hopes to integrate storage and retrieval markets in the next few weeks before testing the go-fil-markets interface.
Tomimoto :
Fuhon is a C++ Filecoin implementation developed by Soramitsu. The Fuhon team is working hard to establish an independent devnet, and is currently completing the implementation of storage miners. As of now, Fuhon miners and nodes are compatible with Lotus 0.5.4. The project is also preparing to implement and run conformance tests to ensure interoperability. One particularly noteworthy change is the recent TLS patch, which enables the connection between Lotus and Forest nodes.
Venus (previously known as go-filecoin) :
go-filecoin was originally developed by Protocol Labs and is now code-named Venus-graduated as a community maintainer in June. We are very happy to welcome IPFSForce, who will be in charge of the project.
The most urgent concern of the project is to keep up with all the changes introduced to the specification and Lotus in the past four months. The synchronized space race chain will be the first milestone towards this goal. The progress to date includes:
- Origin analysis and import
- Update the data structure to reflect the latest changes
- Update election logic (introducing WinCount)
- Update project dependencies (eg DRAND, for randomness)
- Test code fix
At the time of this writing, the team can partially synchronize the "space race" chain, but there are still many improvements that need to be made, especially in terms of performance. The goal of the new team is to interoperate with Lotus within a month, which is a very fast timetable. If anyone can do it, it is the team!
lotus:
For the time being, Lotus is still the most mature Filecoin implementation. Just yesterday, the Lotus implementation released v1.0.0 together with the mainnet released last week.
In the past, the focus of implementation was to prepare and test for the upgrade of standard participants, to create a flexible state upgrade framework, and to develop Lotus-lite (gateway-based nodes without chain storage, which can be implemented through remote nodes).
This provides a wallet that can directly interact with miners without the need to maintain heavyweight components, such as synchronized chain stores. The ultimate goal of this work is to have a client that can run on the phone!
Next, the team is carrying out a status upgrade for FIP-0004, which has been approved for all four implementations last week and has received strong support from the mining industry. They are also making major improvements to the storage miner code, which will undergo incremental improvements in the next few weeks.