Firedancer is a new validator client for Solana.

• Fast Designed from the ground up to be fast. The concurrency model is borrowed from the low latency trading space, and the code contains many novel high performance reimplementations of core Solana primitives.
• Secure The architecture of the validator allows it to run almost completely in user space with a highly restrictive sandbox.
• Independent Firedancer is written from scratch. This brings client diversity to the Solana network and helps it stay resilient to supply chain attacks in build tooling or dependencies.

Firedancer is currently under heavy development and is not ready for production use. There are no releases available.

The getting started guide has detailed system setup instructions.

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer.git
$ cd firedancer
$ ./deps.sh
$ make -j run

The make run target runs the fddev dev command. This development command will ensure your system is configured correctly before starting a Solana validator on the local machine. fddev will use sudo to make privileged changes to system configuration where needed.

By default fddev will create a new chain with a genesis block, along with any keys needed to start the initial validator. If you wish to join this cluster with other validators, you can define [rpc.entrypoints] in the configuration file to point at your first validator and run fddev dev again.

In production, it is recommended to configure the system immediately at boot time rather than when running Firedancer. This ensures a contiguous block of memory can be reserved, as it may not be possible when the machine has been running a long time.

$ fdctl configure init all

fdctl reads from an optional FIREDANCER_CONFIG_TOML environment variable to determine all configuration. A complete list of configuration options and their defaults are provided in default.toml

Later, when you wish to start the validator, you can run

$ fdctl run

Unlike fddev, fdctl will not try to gain root to perform configuration, and will not automatically create required keys or a genesis block. The [rpc.entrypoints] and [consensus.identity_path] configuration options must be defined in order to start the production validator.

Some of the privileged system configuration steps performed by fdctl configure are,

• Huge pages Memory needed for Firedancer must be pre-allocated before launching it. Firedancer uses huge and gigantic memory pages, which are mounted in a local directory. Enabling huge pages and mounting them to a pseudo filesystem requires root privileges.
• XDP Kernel bypass is used for networking, via the eXpress Data Path. Installing the packet filtering code into the driver requires a privileged process, and must be done before running Firedancer. You may also need to configure the network driver to support multiple channels, which requires root.
• Sandboxing Firedancer installs a BPF program to restrict itself from making certain system calls, and in certain development environemnts fdctl installs network namespaces to simplify network debugging when using XDP. Performing these initial restrictions can require additional capabilities.

A good way to see what privileges are needed to configure the environment is to run fdctl configure init all as a non-privileged user, which will display information about the operations it wishes to perform.

Firedancer is available under the Apache 2 license. Firedancer also includes external libraries that are available under a variety of licenses. See LICENSE for the full license text.