Firedancer v26.10.2 is mainnet-ready, with Alpenglow support and 159 GiB memory use

Victoria Shinder15 October 2026, 06:561 min read

The Firedancer validator client published v26.10.2 on 14 October 2026 and marks it as a mainnet-ready release. It carries the feature set first shipped in v26.10.0 on 7 October, which was labelled a testnet-only release.

Consensus. The client now supports Alpenglow, enabled by default in the testnet and devnet configurations ([consensus] alpenglow = true). The release notes state that migrating a node from Tower to Alpenglow will not be supported. It also supports all Solana 4.3 features.

Resources and speed. Mainnet memory use drops from 183 to 159 GiB, and snapshot loading on mainnet falls to about 40 seconds, with parallelism tunable through snapdc_tile_count and snapin_tile_count. The notes list performance work across replay, execution, verification, gossip and the GUI; the default number of verify and gossip-verify tiles has been halved, and rare voting stalls on low-powered machines are gone.

Operations.

• set-identity can now require a tower or the new Alpenglow vote-history file (--vote-history-file), and the validator can write an Agave-compatible tower or vote-history file as it runs, for safe failover to Agave. This breaks compatibility with admin commands from v26.9.x binaries.
• A new firedancer wait command blocks until the validator is in a safe state to fail over or exit.
• Firedancer can now act as an entrypoint node for Agave validators, and its built-in RPC adds getMaxRetransmitSlot, getSlotLeader(s) and getLeaderSchedule.

Under the hood. OpenSSL is replaced by a lightweight custom TLS implementation, cutting cold compile times below three seconds. An experimental low-CPU mode, [layout] mode = "efficient", lets tiles sleep in the kernel instead of busy-spinning; the team says it is not yet recommended for production.

Source: Firedancer, release v26.10.2 — https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/releases/tag/v26.10.2