SLV Supports SHA-256 Optimization Patch (aka kagren patch) to Accelerate Solana Validator PoH

ELSOUL LABO B.V. (Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands; Representative Director CEO: Fumitake Kawasaki) and Validators DAO, which develop and operate the open-source Solana development tool SLV, have released support for an optimization patch (commonly known as the kagren patch) that accelerates SHA-256 calculations for Solana validator's Proof of History (PoH).

After practical operational verification with Epics DAO validators, it has been incorporated in a way that SLV users can apply it to both Solana validators and Solana RPC nodes simply by interacting with an AI agent.

A performance improvement of 10-20% is expected in PoH speed checks during startup on AMD Zen3 and later CPUs equipped with SHA-NI instructions. This performance improvement directly translates to increased processing余裕 (margin/headroom) for Solana validators during leader slots.

SLV Official Website: https://slv.dev/ja SLV GitHub: https://github.com/validatorsDAO/slv

What is the kagren patch? — An initiative to pinpoint optimize the hottest path of Solana validators Solana's consensus is based on a continuous SHA-256 hash chain called PoH (Proof of History). The process of generating the next hash using the previous hash (32 bytes) as input is repeated hundreds of thousands of times within one slot (approximately 400 milliseconds). Among the code paths of Solana validators, this PoH SHA-256 calculation is the most frequently executed process and a dominant consumer of CPU time.

The "kagren patch" is an initiative to pinpoint optimize this hottest path. The original author, kagren, forked solana-sdk's sha256-hasher and provided a SHA-NI implementation specialized for PoH's input conditions of 32 bytes and 1 block.

This patch is released under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and redistribute it. We sincerely respect kagren's efforts, which were released as a contribution to the entire Solana ecosystem.

solana-sha256-hasher-optimized (kagren): https://github.com/kagren/solana-sha256-hasher-optimized