Blockchain Rebuilt for Scale

Solana™ is a new blockchain architecture built from the ground up for scale. The architecture supports up to 710 thousand transactions per second on a gigabit network.

Read all about it at Solana: Blockchain Rebuilt for Scale.

Developing

Building

Install rustc, cargo and rustfmt:

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
$ source $HOME/.cargo/env
$ rustup component add rustfmt

If your rustc version is lower than 1.39.0, please update it:

$ rustup update

On Linux systems you may need to install libssl-dev, pkg-config, zlib1g-dev, etc. On Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libudev-dev pkg-config zlib1g-dev llvm clang

Download the source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/solana-labs/solana.git
$ cd solana

Build

$ cargo build

Then to run a minimal local cluster

$ ./run.sh

Testing

Run the test suite:

$ cargo test

Local Testnet

Start your own testnet locally, instructions are in the online docs Solana: Blockchain Rebuild for Scale: Getting Started.

Remote Testnets

• testnet - public stable testnet accessible via devnet.solana.com. Runs 24/7

Deploy process

They are deployed with the ci/testnet-manager.sh script through a list of scheduled buildkite jobs. Each testnet can be manually manipulated from buildkite as well.

How do I reset the testnet?

Manually trigger the testnet-management pipeline and when prompted select the desired testnet

How can I scale the tx generation rate?

Increase the TX rate by increasing the number of cores on the client machine which is running bench-tps or run multiple clients. Decrease by lowering cores or using the rayon env variable RAYON_NUM_THREADS=<xx>

How can I test a change on the testnet?

Currently, a merged PR is the only way to test a change on the testnet. But you can run your own testnet using the scripts in the net/ directory.

Adjusting the number of clients or validators on the testnet

Edit ci/testnet-manager.sh

Metrics Server Maintenance

Sometimes the dashboard becomes unresponsive. This happens due to glitch in the metrics server. The current solution is to reset the metrics server. Use the following steps.

1. The server is hosted in a GCP VM instance. Check if the VM instance is down by trying to SSH into it from the GCP console. The name of the VM is metrics-solana-com.
2. If the VM is inaccessible, reset it from the GCP console.
3. Once VM is up (or, was already up), the metrics services can be restarted from build automation.
   1. Navigate to https://buildkite.com/solana-labs/metrics-dot-solana-dot-com in your web browser
   2. Click on New Build
   3. This will show a pop up dialog. Click on options drop down.
   4. Type in FORCE_START=true in Environment Variables text box.
   5. Click Create Build
   6. This will restart the metrics services, and the dashboards should be accessible afterwards.

Debugging Testnet

Testnet may exhibit different symptoms of failures. Primary statistics to check are

1. Rise in Confirmation Time
2. Nodes are not voting
3. Panics, and OOM notifications

Check the following if there are any signs of failure.

1. Did testnet deployment fail?
   1. View buildkite logs for the last deployment: https://buildkite.com/solana-labs/testnet-management
   2. Use the relevant branch
   3. If the deployment failed, look at the build logs. The build artifacts for each remote node is uploaded. It's a good first step to triage from these logs.
2. You may have to log into remote node if the deployment succeeded, but something failed during runtime.
   1. Get the private key for the testnet deployment from metrics-solana-com GCP instance.
   2. SSH into metrics-solana-com using GCP console and do the following.

   sudo bash
   cd ~buildkite-agent/.ssh
   ls
   

   3. Copy the relevant private key to your local machine
   4. Find the public IP address of the AWS instance for the remote node using AWS console
   5. ssh -i <private key file> ubuntu@<ip address of remote node>
   6. The logs are in ~solana\solana folder

Benchmarking

First install the nightly build of rustc. cargo bench requires use of the unstable features only available in the nightly build.

$ rustup install nightly

Run the benchmarks:

$ cargo +nightly bench

Release Process

The release process for this project is described here.

Code coverage

To generate code coverage statistics:

$ scripts/coverage.sh
$ open target/cov/lcov-local/index.html

Why coverage? While most see coverage as a code quality metric, we see it primarily as a developer productivity metric. When a developer makes a change to the codebase, presumably it's a solution to some problem. Our unit-test suite is how we encode the set of problems the codebase solves. Running the test suite should indicate that your change didn't infringe on anyone else's solutions. Adding a test protects your solution from future changes. Say you don't understand why a line of code exists, try deleting it and running the unit-tests. The nearest test failure should tell you what problem was solved by that code. If no test fails, go ahead and submit a Pull Request that asks, "what problem is solved by this code?" On the other hand, if a test does fail and you can think of a better way to solve the same problem, a Pull Request with your solution would most certainly be welcome! Likewise, if rewriting a test can better communicate what code it's protecting, please send us that patch!

Disclaimer

All claims, content, designs, algorithms, estimates, roadmaps, specifications, and performance measurements described in this project are done with the author's best effort. It is up to the reader to check and validate their accuracy and truthfulness. Furthermore nothing in this project constitutes a solicitation for investment.