firedancer

Firedancer

Firedancer is a new validator client for Solana.

• Fast Designed from the ground up to be fast. The concurrency model draws from experience in 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 with a highly restrictive sandbox and almost no system calls.
• 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.

Documentation

If you are an operator or looking to run the validator, see the Getting Started guide in the Firedancer docs

Releases

If you are an operator looking to run the validator, see the Releases Guide in the documentation.

The Firedancer project is producing two validators,

• Frankendancer A hybrid validator using parts of Firedancer and parts of Agave. Frankendancer uses the Firedancer networking stack and block production components to perform better while leader. Other functionality including execution and consensus is using the Agave validator code.
• Firedancer A full from-scratch Firedancer with no Agave code.

Both validators are built from this codebase.

Developing

Firedancer currently only supports Linux and requires a relatively new kernel, at least v4.18 to build.

$ git clone https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer.git
$ cd firedancer
$ ./deps.sh
$ source activate  # enter build environment
$ make -j

# Run a new development cluster
$ firedancer-dev

# Join Solana testnet
$ firedancer-dev --testnet

firedancer-dev (without args) configures your system for validator operation and creates a new lcoal development cluster. First it creates a genesis block, some keys, a faucet, and then it starts a validator on the local machine. firedancer-dev will use sudo to make privileged changes to system configuration where needed. If sudo is not available, you may need to run the command as root.

If you wish to join this cluster with other validators, you can define [gossip.entrypoints] in the configuration file to point at your first validator and join with firedancer-dev run.

License

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.