Highlights from Solana Foundation's Validator Call - October 10, 2024

As an active Solana governance and community participant, we regularly attend community and validator calls.

Here are the notes validator call hosted by the Solana Foundation on October 10, 2024.

Validator Updates:

• Agave 1.18.25: Recommended for mainnet beta with pending feature activations after Agave 2.0 is adopted on the cluster. Engineers are waiting for the adoption of Agave 2.0 before activating features that were previously tested on Testnet.
• TVC Upgrade: Expected soon after Agave 2.0 adoption. Mainnet operators are encouraged to push for a quick upgrade.
• 2.0 Rollout Process: Initiating with a Testnet restart, followed by a request for 10% stake on mainnet beta, then 25%, and eventually full cluster adoption. The goal is to have version 2.0 fully adopted by early November, pending smooth rollout.

Firedancer Release:

• Firedancer is now live on both mainnet and testnet. The versioning partially aligns with Agave, with V0 indicating Firedancer versions. It is primarily for block building, while the underlying Agave code handles other functions.
• Firedancer currently does not support lookup table transactions or Jito, which affects certain protocol use cases.
• A Firedancer Spotlight video was shared for further details.

Agave 2.0 Changes:

• Breaking Changes: Deprecated RPC methods will be removed, and the Solana Labs repository will stop publishing updates for version 2.0, with validators needing to switch to the Agave repository.
• Validators should update to the Agave Validator binary, replacing the previous Solana Validator binary.

Building from Source:

• Agave 2.1 may not include pre-built binaries for validators, prompting operators to build from source.
• There will be new documentation and discussions on building from source, with some operators already building Jito from source.

Testnet Restart:

• A planned restart failed due to version discrepancies between Agave and Firedancer. Debugging efforts are ongoing, and another testnet restart is planned after resolving the issue.

Block Zero Event:

• Block Zero 2025 will be held in Abu Dhabi from December 11-13, 2025. The event is expected to be a valuable networking opportunity for validators and the ecosystem.

Open Discussion:

• Vote Modifications: Validators discussed the risks of running vote modifications and how TVC activation could diminish the value of these mods.
• A tool was mentioned for checking TVC stats (VXTools app).
• Validators were advised to exercise caution when modifying code, as it could introduce risks to the cluster.
• The next Solana Foundation Validator Discussion will be held on the second Thursday of the month, with a community call scheduled for the fourth Thursday.

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