Firedancer 🔥💃

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 a new implementation of a Solana validator client, 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.

Installation

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

Developing

The getting started guide has detailed system setup instructions.

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

Running

Firedancer uses several privileged operating system features to improve performance and security. These can be configured manually in your environment, but we also have a command line utility fdctl that lets a user set up and tear down the environment easily.

$ cargo run configure all init # Configure required system knobs
$ cargo run run # Run the Firedancer program

When done, the environment can be returned to normal.

$ cargo run configure all check # Check if the system is configured correctly
$ cargo run configure all fini # Remove any special configuration we installed

fdctl reads from a FIREDANCER_CONFIG_TOML environment variable to determine all options needed in configuring and running the program. A complete list of configuration options is provided in default.toml

Some of the privileged system configuration steps performed by fdctl 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 as a non-privileged user, which will display information about the operations it wishes to perform.

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.