Solana Tech Roundup

Solana 1.9 is fast approaching Mainnet-beta with Devnet and Testnet already upgraded to 1.9.9. This is a highly anticipated upgrade, with many possible features that can be game changing for developers. If you're interested in checking out these features today, you can test them out locally using local-test-validator.

Proposal Highlight

Cluster Test Framework

Documentation

The goal of the cluster test framework is to be able to test any deployed cluster's stability, consensus, fault tolerance, and API stability.

All tests are provided an entrypoint and a funded keypair. Tests start with discovering available nodes. Locally, this can be configurable. This test framework allows for better testing against edge cases with validators and protecting against a future change introducing an attack vector in production.

Commit Highlights

• getMultipleAccounts provides slot context now
  • You can now get context on the account state retrieved
• New accounts must be Rent Exempt
  • Requirement on all new accounts being rent exempt is a big change to look out for in the future

List of Changes:

February 25

• Upgrade to use rust 1.59.0
• Cleaning up replay_blockstore_into_bank
• Enabling Benchmarks on the vote processor

February 26

• Prevent new RentPaying state due to fees being deducted on account load
  • As part of making all new accounts require the full rent exemption status on creation, accounts also need to not paying extra rent on creation

February 28

• Don't check if rent is due if exempt
• Updated durable-nonce docs to use transfer

March 1

• Allow all transfers to the 1nc1nerator
  • Even below rent paying balances of SOL can now be sent to be burned
• When querying a block that is not stored on the RPC, you will now get a proper error instead of null
• Solana Ping added to explorer
  • Explorer will now show charts on current health of the cluster

March 2

• Add ability to expose another TPU port to proxy traffic
• getMultipleAccounts provides slot context now
• Resized accounts must be rent exempt
• Separate shred storage types by blockstores
  • Different storage increasing the efficiency of storing data with different compaction methods