Solana Tech Roundup

The legacy BPF loader for programs will be deprecated soon. The feature is currently activated on Testnet and will be activated in the future on Devnet and Mainnet-beta. Make sure you are using the latest BPF Upgradeable Loader when deploying programs on the network.

As a reminder, if you're a developer going to Breakpoint November 4-7, make sure you apply for a discounted developer ticket.

Proposal Highlight

Unified Scheduler

There is a proposal being drafted to bring a unified scheduler to Solana to help schedule transactions based on fees paid. The scheduler brings a number of changes to how transactions are scheduled on Solana, from reducing the amount of threads scheduling the transactions to ordering via the priority fees paid.

Today leaders are gaming to pack transactions not to create idling time of blocktime instead of avoiding creating empty space of blockspace. The unified scheduler will help make it easier to blockspace to be filled instead of managing blocktime.

This proposal is still in draft! Be sure to contribute to the discussion.

Commit Highlights

• Migrate Solana SDK from BPF to SBF
  • Solana Binary Format, custom BPF implementation specifically for Solana

List of Changes

7th October

• Migrate Solana SDK from BPF to SBF
  • Solana Binary Format, custom BPF implementation specifically for Solana
• metrics: Report additional transaction errors to metrics
• logs: Add log info for load race condition asserts
  • information on the specific pubkey to help track its journey
• Separate account locks validation from creating the locks
  • Separate checks if we can lock accounts for tx (duplicate and count checks) from getting the locks
• Correctly mark packets as forwarded
  • Not all packets left in banking buffer have been selected for forwarding

9th October

• Make Blockstore::get_entries_in_data_block() use multi_get()
  • gains of a batched read vs multiple individual reads
• Make FIFO related validator arguments public
  • Makes two FIFO-related validator arguments public: --rocksdb_shred_compaction and --rocksdb_fifo_shred_storage_size

10th October

• use signed repair request variants
  • repair requests should be signed

11th October

• Explorer: Support displaying closed program accounts
• Explorer: Support additional bpf upgradeable loader instructions
• feat: add getParsedBlock method to Connection
• Increase cpu metric reporting interval from 1s to 10s

12th October

• add curve25519 multiscalar multiplication syscall
  • Multiscalar multiplication (msm) syscalls were missing for curve25519.