firedancer-io/firedancer v26.10.0

Firedancer Testnet Release v26.10.0

on GitHub

This is a Testnet release. It is not suggested for Mainnet use.

• Support for Alpenglow. It is enabled in the default testnet and devnet configs ([consensus] alpenglow = true). Migration from Tower to Alpenglow will not be supported.
• Support for all Solana 4.3 features.
• Reduced mainnet memory usage from 183 to 159 GiB.
• Faster snapshot loading, down to 40 seconds for mainnet. Configure parallelism with snapdc_tile_count and snapin_tile_count.
• Added support for requiring tower, or the new Alpenglow vote history file, in set-identity, with --vote-history-file argument. The validator can also write an Agave compatible tower or Alpenglow vote history file as it runs, for safe failover to Agave, see paths.vote_history. This breaks compatibility with admin commands from v26.9.x binaries.
• Added the firedancer wait command, which blocks until the validator reaches a safe state to be failed away from, or exited. Refer to the CLI documentation for more details.
• Improvements to automatic topology layout on low power machines.
• Many performance improvements, including to replay, execution, verification, gossip, and the GUI. Default tiles for verify and gossip verify have been cut in half as a result. Rare voting stalls on low powered machines have been eliminated.
• Improved automatic configuration of mlx5 networking, including a new uverbs configure stage which loads the ib_uverbs kernel module for you, and support for loopback RX.
• Reduced code dependencies further, including eliminating OpenSSL in favor of a lightweight custom TLS implementation. Cold compile times reduced as a result to below three seconds.
• Support for getMaxRetransmitSlot, getSlotLeader(s), and getLeaderSchedule added to the built in RPC.
• Firedancer now supports being an entrypoint node for Agave validators.
• Added support an experimental low CPU usage mode, [layout] mode = "efficient". In efficient mode, tiles do not busy spin CPU cores and intstead sleep in the kernel. Power draw and temperatures are dramatically reduced. This mode is not yet recommended for production use.
• Stake delegations gained a fallback disk path, which will not be written during routine or healthy operations. Configurable at [paths] stake_delegations