Demystifying the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM)

The Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) is described as a runtime environment for smart contracts, also called actors, on the Filecoin network, intended to bring user programmability to Filecoin. It is designed to host multiple runtimes, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Secure EcmaScript (SES), and eBPF, and it is built on WASM and uses syscalls, drawing on hypervisor, actor model, and Unix kernel principles. According to the article, its components include the Invocation Container, which sandboxes actor code, and the Kernel, which processes syscalls and manages state. The article also says the FVM manages the IPLD state tree, buffering writes until successful execution and performing gas accounting.