Firedancer π₯π
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.
If you are an operator or looking to run the validator, see the Getting Started guide in the Firedancer docs
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. The Firedancer validator is not ready for test or production use and has no releases. Frankendancer is currently in testing on the Solana testnet.
Firedancer currently only supports Linux and requires a relatively new kernel, at least v4.18 to build.
$ 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 creating
a genesis block, some keys, a faucet, and then starting a validator on
the local machine. fddev
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.
By default fddev
will create a new development cluster, 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.
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.