Discuss: EVM actors as built-in actors

[raulk]

Context

The most recent go-to-market strategy for FVM M2 proposes shipping EVM compatibility first, prior to shipping native actor features such as native actor deployability.

That means we need to ship the EVM runtime (and associated actors) as built-in actors. This may be a temporary measure (while the network doesn't support native actor deploys), or it may be a permanent one if these actors need to access privileged syscalls (see filecoin-project/ref-fvm#468).

These actors are being developed in https://github.com/filecoin-project/fvm-evm/ (private during incubation).

Proposal

1. Host these actors under an evm subtree.
2. Set up CODEOWNERS if there's too much review cross-chatter between actors not maintained by the FVM team vs. actors maintained by the FVM team.

Alternatives

We could keep EVM actors in a repo of their own and produce a separate bundle. However, this would:

• Require changes in the bundling system client side to support importing multiple bundles at once.
• Break the elegance of the manifest symmetry (manifest in the bundle is exactly the manifest you link to the system actor, requiring no transformations).

Alternatively, we could merge bundles off-band before integrating into clients.

We (FVM team) consider the complexity of both solutions unwarranted.

[ZenGround0]

Hosting actors under the /actors/evm sounds good. I don't expect too much cross-chatter.

[anorth]

Sounds good to me. My only thought is to ensure the EVM is not privileged wrt other hosted VMs we might support in the future, but more directories like actors/my-vm will probably be fine.

[anorth]

@raulk ok to close this now?