High TPS for Self-Sovereign nodes

Jaws v0.19.0

In this release, we celebrate high TPS in testnets with self-sovereign nodes. Prior to v0.18, we ran testnets using cloud services such as AWS and Google Cloud. In v0.18, we added "the shredder" to Turbine to support the networking infrastructure used by our Tour de SOL participants. That first implementation got us through TdS Dry Run 4, but introduced a large performance regression in the process. This release includes an optimized shredder that's so good it may have you wondering if we named the release after it. The answer is no. :)

Major Features And Improvements

• New documentation site! https://docs.solana.com
• Resolved the 0.18 TPS regression
• In response to Tour de SOL Dry Run 4, we continued to improve Validator ergonomics:
  • solana-validator now verifies NAT/Router configuration at boot, avoiding obscure errors
  • solana command-line now understands both SOLs and lamports
  • Added BIP39 mnemonic-based keypair generation to solana-keygen
  • Added new solana uptime command
• Streamlined CUDA support, no more need to set obscure environment variables
• Added BPF program support for Rust's libstd
  • No longer constrained by Rust's no_std environment
  • Some restrictions still exist, for example, no thread support, random number support, etc...
  • Most Rust crates now supported, some may still not like the BPF target triple
• Rust BPF programs now use the common Solana SDK crate
  • Switched to use standard Solana types such as Pubkey, sysvars, etc...
  • Updated BPF program entrypoint to use Solana SDK types.

Breaking Changes

• Rust BPF type and entrypoint changes
  • Existing Rust BPF programs must be ported over from the Sol types (SolPubkey) to the common types 'Pubkey'
  • Existing Rust BPF programs must be ported over from to the new entrypoint.
  • The following examples have been ported and are good references for what needs to be ported:
    • https://github.com/solana-labs/example-messagefeed
    • https://github.com/solana-labs/example-tictactoe

TPS

Node Count	Avg TPS	Max TPS	Avg Confirmation	Max Confirmation
10	28,158	55,709	1.43	5.41
25	20,308	125,223	2.75	20.3
50	9,516	44,403	5.31	37.3

Known Issues

• Windows binaries not available (#6033)
• crates.io release assets not available